Right now in the NEW/NOW gallery at New Britain Museum of American Art is a dilapidated home. Rough beams with jagged holes make up the walls and floor. Dead leaves are seen through the floorboards and the walls are patched with old newspaper. A fallen tree has crashed through a bureau and a lampshade is burned and full of holes. Rope keep all the elements from crashing on each other.
Titus Kaphar, creator of “The Vesper Project,” says he is telling a story about the Vesper family, destroyed by scandal, and the house represents one Vesper’s psychological journey. But is he really telling the Vespers’ story? Kaphar makes this difficult to determine, intentionally.
“The project is not about hard facts. It’s about that murky place in between fact and fiction and memory, where things get mixed and blurred. It’s about the brain struggling to find a place it calls truth,” said Kaphar, of New Haven.
It could be said the project is a novel in the form of sculpture, with the reader filling in the missing storyline.
“When we say ‘real,’ what do we mean? When you read a good piece of fiction, you find yourself falling into these stories. They work because you experience something that seems like truth to you even though you know it’s false,” he said.
NEW/NOW: TITUS KAPHAR THE VESPER PROJECT will be at New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington St., until Feb. 22. nbmaa.org.
