Valerie Piraino’s past is filled with bits and pieces of domestic life being cobbled together to create something resembling a whole. At least, that’s what it feels like in a string of works contained in her solo show currently on view in the Meyerhoff Gallery of MICA’s Fox Building. The Rwanda-born, New York-based 2004 MICA alumnus has created a series of frames, images, and screens in these five mixed-media creations and one installation. In pieces such as “Pith,” “Split,” and “Staged,” actual pieces of a home—drywall, wood trim, wood paneling, wallpaper—get assembled with parts of furniture and picture frames to form curio pieces of plaintive nostalgia but curious purpose. In one, wallpaper partially covers a rhombus of drywall with one edge cracked and crumbling. In another, a wood frame surrounds a stretch of drywall wallpaper; on its flip side is mirrorized Plexiglas, the entire thing held up by a single plank. The effect is something like having to decorate the home after some disaster, taking whatever survived and trying to go forward with that.

It’s an impression heightened by Piraino’s installation, “Fidelity.” An array of six empty frames covers one wall; in front of them on the floor stands a portable screen, tilted slightly away from parallel to the wall. About six feet away from the gallery wall Piraino has built another movable wall; the side facing the frames is all exposed wood and later support beams, where one slide projector rests. It shines an image onto the larger, empty space inside one of the frames on the gallery wall. The other side of the moveable wall features a soft rose-colored wallpaper with a rather old-fashioned repeating design; an oval frame is hung high and centered, though there is nothing in the frame. Off to the right of the movable wall is a low side table with a second slide projector. It casts its images against the screen and the wall at an oblique angle, distorting the image in the process.

The projector cycles through the carousel. Some of the images appear upside down; in others, certain faces look familiar or at least appear to recur. The same family? It’s impossible to tell. The projected images are too distorted to see clearly, although when they fall upon the empty frames on the wall you sense what they’re trying to be but can’t. This photo montage is less the snapshots that form a family’s memories than something that aspires to be that kind of memory book but can’t. It’s an imperfect image album, a skewed catalog of times, places, and faces. A visual story that’s telling part of a story, but there are too many gaps to fill in to understand it clearly. Images tell stories, but not always the same ones to different people.

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