“In Defense of Home” (2015-present)
“In Defense of Home” explores the search for personal narrative derived from the experiences of growing up on military bases throughout the United States. Muldrow hunts and gathers found photographs, personal family albums, maps, and internet searches, circling around classified sites, blocked street views, decommissioned locations creating taxonomic structures of images. Each emplotment reveals elements significant to the processes of making meaning from an intentional paucity of information. Memory and the gathered information become paintings that are organized into conceptual systems to better understand the experience of home.
Muldrow experiments in her process to define her experience of “home.” Muldrow paints images sourced from Google maps, notating the longitude/latitude and intersections that lead to one of her childhood homes on Edwards Air Force Base (AFB) in the desert of Southern California. The maps and roads that lead to Edwards AFB are taken from Google streetviews and satellite maps until they reach the restricted government zone, the borders of Edwards Air Force Base. Each map in the digital world bounces back onto surrounding roads around the military black-out zone. Mapping to find “home,” this truncated search reveals that the awareness of space becomes wholly dependant on the knowledge of the relationships in the space.
Muldrow then searches for her narrative in literal imagery. Using representations of military bases and the banal juxtapositions of on-base parks, military jets as monuments, churches, watchtowers, white picket fences and security fences, Muldrow examines how each piece fits into a planned model of American community within a military environment, an environment completely controlled by the government. Muldrow explores how visual imagery can express these ideas using representational images, patterns, and military iconography: juxtaposing symbols of comfort with symbols of security.
Schematically organizing elements in the search for significance, Muldrow reveals a candid glimpse of an America that is a complex arrangement of manipulated elements within a universal experience, the experience of home.
