AMY RITTER
Artist Statement
I’m inspired by mobile home communities and the people who live there. I stage memories of growing up in Li’l Wolf—a place I’ve left but still feel rooted, to expose the socio-spatial, shame of home, phenomenon while humanizing mobile home park residents. I’m also curious about my queer female body at work, as another building material, a symbol of invisible labor. More directly I explore my white working-class family’s experience living in a double-wide trailer and my family’s connection to the American Dream.
I created a company called the MH Archive. Instituting as an archive, I travel across the United states documenting mobile home communities (over 50 sites in 17 states) and interview residents, park managers, and owners. I compile research on the mobile home industry and culture; and create and exhibit work influenced by these archives I’ve built. These communities are strategically relegated to resource-deficient areas on the outskirts of cities, hidden and forgotten. My work exposes and brings to the foreground these challenges to restore the dignity of these people. Using Xerox prints, plywood, gravel and cinder blocks—materials that relate back to the makeshift homes of my past—I aim to represent and understand the environment I came from and navigate the place I inhabit now.