Intimate documentation

How Ezri Horne and Indigo Conat-Naar drew each other's memories

Imagine the layout of the house where you grew up. When I conjure mine, textures come first: The sticky smoothness of the off-white vinyl-upholstered couch in the center of the living room opposite the fireplace. The cool of the slate foyer under my bare feet. The hash-mark texture of the mottled gold wallpaper in the hallway. The space itself is imprinted in my psyche – the long hallway to the bedrooms, the large-ish kitchen with the orange formica table and the matching built-in bench.

For the collaborative work You draw my house, I’ll draw yours, Ezri Horne and Indigo Conat-Naar set out to share the spaces of their childhoods. One described the layout of their home while the other attempted to draw it. The piece is on view in their show Going Nowhere in Either Direction at Piano Craft Gallery through June 29.

But it’s hard to picture someone else’s home if you haven’t been there.

“Notably, in our first drawings, we misinterpreted each other’s words in a way that mirrored the layout of our own houses,” they write below. The back-and-forth went through several iterations, and the rough drawings grew to be more like architect’s renderings. They used laborious processes to fashion each version, so that both the drawings – turned into a cyanotypes that echo blueprints – and the transcribed descriptions required sweat and attention.

An architectural blueprint is a design plan, with specs and calculations and notations. It’s also a vision of something yet to be. Indigo and Ezri, in a way, reverse-engineered an architect’s process. They worked from their imaginations to create a blueprint of something that, for them, lives in the past.

Ultimately, You draw my house, I’ll draw yours leaps into the gulf between two people’s private memories. The project, which they are turning into a book they hope to make available at their upcoming exhibition at Unbound Visual Arts (Overlook Gallery) from July 6 to August 10– and then online – is also about building a bridge between those two inaccessible storehouses of feeling, sensation, and story. It’s an exercise in empathy.

“I did gain a better image of Indigo as a child, and had a place to locate stories she had told me,” Ezri wrote in an email. “…I have a vision of her living room and her playing it. I can conjure a kitchen that is clearly ‘Indigo's kitchen,’ and it is fully furnished with the details of life, like scratched chairs and little stacks of mail on the counter.”

Perhaps they know each other a little better.

Indigo and Ezri write: