Homing In With New DORF Gallery Show

What does it feel like to be home, or to want to be? In “Homeward Bound,” artists Josue Bessiake, Esther Marie Hall, and Bárbara Miñarro explore the expansive concept of the home as not just a place to go, but as a feeling, memory, and experience. The group exhibition, presented by contemporary art gallery DORF, opens Friday and runs through May 23.   

The body of works first laid roots in October 2024, when the three artists met at the Flower Shop Art Residency, an artist-in-residence program in Brownsville, Texas. The three formed a fast friendship and discovered they had each been exploring similar themes independently, Bessiake said. 

“We all kind of just clicked, and we were all really trying to do some work together,” he said. “Then recently, the stars just aligned. [DORF] had an opening, we had the work, and our works all kind of melded together. So it was perfect timing.”

Through installation, sculpture, and textile-based works, each artist approaches the interpretation of home in a different way – Bessiake as a physical structure, Miñarro as embodiment and belonging within the body, and Hall as an existential state of being.

If these walls would listen by Josue Bessiake Credit: DORF

For Bessiake, who moved around frequently throughout his childhood, home was never a specific location, but rather wherever his siblings and parents were. His structural interest in the home traces back to memories of road trips when moving to a new place, he said. 

“I remember just looking out the window and really being interested in the structure of all these different houses that I’d seen,” Bessiake said. “Sort of how specific the structure of this place was to any particular state or environment that we were in.”

His art explores the idea that one-to-one pieces that reference a very specific place by embodying these structures can evoke memories of home. “It’s been this idea of taking chunks out of space from whatever place I visited,” he said. “I like the idea that they arrive at some sort of form.” Through physical structures informed by painting, his primary medium, his work borrows materials from places he’s visited – tar paper from Joshua Tree, Calif.; dried paint flakes from Brownsville; bits and bobs that form an assemblage of materials to reference the feeling of home.  

“I’m collaging and combining these sort of anatomical areas of the home,” Bessiake said. “[Like] if the home was a body, like intramuscular systems, using the skin, using the bones of a home.”

Friday’s opening reception will also feature a performance by Bessiake and curatorial fellow Jesus Treviño, which will examine the different ways that tiny, confined spaces have been used for different purposes. The exhibition will be open on Saturdays from noon to 5pm through May 23.

In their interpretations of home’s meaning and the pursuit of it, each artist pays special attention to the specificity of choice, Bessiake explained. “I really feel like, when every choice is available to you, I think the specificity of your choice is what creates meaning,” he said. “If I could use any material in the world to explore whatever I’m doing, being very specific and intentional about that is what creates that meaning and creates that feeling of being in pursuit of home.”

“Homeward Bound” Opening Reception Friday 27, DORF at Zilker Point dorfworld.org

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