"Our Sometimes Home" by April Werle

Our Sometimes Home is a multimedia exhibition about inherited grief and anxiety around cultural and racial awareness as two characters navigate home life, and internalize what ‘90s and early 2000s pop culture media suggests about what the ideal family looks like. How do children emotionally connect to the TV, and what do they internalize about American culture and social norms while their parents are working?

The exhibition features a series of paintings, shadow murals, and an animated projection, following two black-and-white hand characters as they experience the anxiety and grief that linger from their absent parents, and how voyeurism becomes a form of escapism through watching families on TV. In each scene, the characters yearn for an unrealistic simplicity that is present on the screen.

April Werle is a narrative painter depicting mixed-race identity, memory, and diaspora through haunting, color-drenched domestic scenes. Werle’s work is deeply inspired by her parents’ arranged marriage and growing up in an immigrant home in Montana. Her recent solo exhibitions include Our Sometimes Home, Glacier Art Museum; I Live With a Ghost, PlatteForum; and My Other Half, The Chase Gallery. Her work has also been exhibited at Brea Gallery and the Montana Museum of Art and Culture. Werle completed a residency at PlatteForum and the Emerging Artist Residency at Centrum Foundation. She was awarded the Creative West Artist Fund Award, as well as the ARPA Grant and the Strategic Investment Grant from the Montana Arts Council. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and Create! Magazine.