Project Statement
I am a member of the tenant class, experiencing unprecedented levels of real estate manipulation and speculation. I am a tenant with limited and enclosed class mobility.
This conversation enters my everyday, when I wake up in the morning, when I get home from work. I have the tools and knowledge, but the dissociative relationship of the tenant-landlord power dynamic keeps me at arms length from where I live.
Homes are built from materials that are on the one hand abundant, available, and inexpensive, and on the other haunted by the histories of violence that brought them into being. Fundamentally, the will to make structures to house people is compromised by market pressures and enclosure of land.
I see the materiality and politics of housing as deeply intertwined. I am presenting this installation as both a sculpture and a site for hosting public conversations or panel discussions surrounding housing justice as well as poetry readings about the journey from log to lumber. The structure itself is an engaging motif to live on in the minds of its viewers as a touchstone to the very real and important conversations we can have around housing.
Jacob Irish is an artist of settler descent from so-called Burlington, Ontario, on land described by Treaty 3 3⁄4 and the Brant Tract Treaty 8.
Jacob has exhibited at the Anna Leonowens Gallery (2014), Centre Bang! (2015) and the Art Gallery of Guelph (2016). A Young Canada Works residency at FOFA Gallery (2017) began their twice-built The Miller and the Baker, shown at Hamilton Artists Inc. during Supercrawl 2018, and awarded an OAC Visual Artists Creation Projects grant. They’ve earned a BFA at NSCAD University (2017) and an MFA at the University of Waterloo (2022).
Jacob has maintained a lifelong drawing practice, adding sculpture, video, and audio work along the way; you can find Jacob in the credits of MOMUS: The Podcast, where they have been doing audio post production since 2018.
