homesick

Penticton Art Gallery

March 22–May 10, 2025 

Alexandra Bischoff’s exhibition homesick is a portrait of family, home, and loss as told through the artist’s family history. Much of Bischoff’s recent artworks unpack personal definitions of “home”; in homesick, Bischoff interrogates their maternal grandfather’s peculiar choices to understand how conceptions of ‘home’ can be inherited. 

Central to the exhibition is the artist’s book Lloyd O (2021–24), which unravels an unlikely family lore. In 1959, Bischoff’s maternal grandfather Lloyd Orville Moss founded a business called the Truth Tapes which produced how-to vinyl records espousing advice on cultivating Catholic households. He sunk all his savings into the project, but the records didn't sell. After Lloyd lost the family home to bankruptcy in '67, his solution was to take his musical children on tour through the prairies. Lloyd billed it as a 'Centennial Tour', aligning the family band as a wholesome extension of Canada’s colonial project. They didn’t succeed financially and Lloyd never recovered, forcing the family into a period of hidden homelessness. After moving his family from shelter to hotel to short-term rental multiple times over, Lloyd succumbed to alcoholism and died young, leaving his family to make homes for themselves.

This saga indelibly affected each of Lloyd’s thirteen children in various and highly personal ways, the repercussions of which extended to Lloyd’s grandchildren. Bischoff’s relative housing insecurity today stems from the circumstances of contemporary housing and rental markets and not because of their grandfather’s risk-taking entrepreneurialism; despite this, through homesick, the artist wonders: what does it mean to be insecurely housed as a settler? How have definitions of “home” changed over time, and what will they be in the future? And what value can be gleaned from unspoken family histories?