"If We Lived Here" and What We Take For Granted
thought pre thesis
In Paula Rebsom’s (b. 1978) 2010 work If We Lived Here, she erects a two-dimensional replica of her family’s farmhouse in North Dakota that was abandoned after a hard winter forced them off their farm. The house was rented out to a couple that “left the home in such disarray it was no longer safe for human occupancy.” In February 2009, the house, barns, and chicken coop on 1,300 acre property were burned for liability concerns after her grandmother gave her parents power of attorney over the property. Rebsom returned the following September with her father and built a 16 x 40 ft billboard-like 2D replica of the home, that would sit a short ways away from the site of the original building. On the back of the structure is an assembly of 20 birdhouses that spell out “If we lived here, I’d be home by now,” as a way to rehome all the birds and animals that lived in the neglected farmhouse after the tenants moved out. The billboard haunts the land on which it resides, which has in a way fought back against this ghostly monument. While it was installed in 2010, little remains of the sculpture due to the bitter climate shifts of North Dakota. Perhaps this is a fitting end for the piece - instead of coming to its end through man-made fire, the land reclaims it bit by bit, allowing it to join the surrounding landscape instead of proudly standing atop. In Rebsom’s words:
“In its simplest form ‘If We Lived Here’ was built in an attempt to provide shelter for the birds that were displaced when their home was destroyed. In its most complex form it is a quiet and haunting, ghostlike reminder of what was, what is no longer, and what may never be. It holds memories far beyond my years and comprehension while at the same time providing a new presence of hope and possibilities for this rural landscape. The landscape my mom was raised on, the land that her and my father would try to make a living off of, a place that I dreamed as a child to call home, the land my sister and I will someday inherit.”
Rebson’s reconstruction of her family’s farmhouse hinges on two misinterpretations by the viewer: the dichotomy of house and home, and the familiar versus unfamiliar. By manipulating the house object, she changes the meaning of the home subject. She strips the house of its purpose by flattening it, leaving it useless. The farmhouse in its now two-dimensional form is perhaps more home than ever: it has become a real-live symbol by being transformed from, for all intents and purposes, a real-live thing, into a 2D representation of it. This work asks us to consider what we take for granted. Rebsom explores how we take for granted that house object and home subject are the same; she reflects her disconnect from her family’s farmhouse by flattening its form into a two-dimensional billboard, stripping it of its structural purpose and therefore house-ness. She transforms it into a symbol of “what was, what is no longer, and what may never be.” In ridding it of its structural responsibilities, Rebsom creates a monument to grief associated with losing this piece of her family’s history.
The difference between house and home is etymological, semantic, spiritual, and vast. And yet we take for granted that the house object and home subject are one and the same. We often use them interchangeably - “I am going to my house” / “let’s go home” - however it is the case that they are distinct. The difference is uncomfortable, for example, when the freshly left-the-nest young adult explains to their parents they are going “home,” and for the first time in their life refer to a place other than the one created for them by their parents, as their home. I am sure there has not been a single occurrence of this that has not resulted in some amount of heartache on both sides. At some point, the place you grew up in ceases to be the center of your life. There are plenty of examples of either word being used in specific situations. The term “home invasion” is one of the better examples of this. You could use “house” and get the idea, but the use of the word “home” packs way more emotion. Not only is this illegal, but more importantly someone’s place of refuge was disturbed, putting their comfort at risk. More than we realize, these words are distinct, although the mental picture might be the same.
The words “house” and “home” come from Old English with Proto-Germanic roots. “House” originates from hus, from hūsan, meaning "dwelling, shelter, building designed to be used as a residence.” Beginning in c.1000, the word took on the meaning of "family, including ancestors and descendants, especially if noble.” In the late 14th century BC, it came to refer to the Zodiac and Astronomical systems. In the 1540s, it adopted the meaning of where a legislative body would meet, and then in the 1660s, it became commonplace to use the word to refer to the audience in a theater. Over 1,500 years, the word “house” underwent a metaphorical shift, a type of semantic change where the meaning of the word extends to suggest a perceived similarity between ideas. The modern meaning of home is proof of this. “House” is a neutral term to refer to the structure you live in. The thread that carries through the metonymy of the word over time is the implication of this. Of course, the root word holds the residential aspect, but in eventual iterations there is a clear correlation between the meaning of “house” and institutions. The metonymizing of the word throughout history to include a various systems and structures, for example, the ruling noble class of England and the aristocracy, the zodiac system as quasi-religion, and legislative building obviously, have done nothing but affirm in our minds that there is a glaring difference between the words “house” and “home.” A house is a structure, literally, and metaphorically.
“Home” is a syntactically complex word; it is a noun, adjective, adverb, and verb. And, it is polysemic, meaning the same lexeme can have highly diverse meanings. The semantic implications of home are broad and ever changing, and it is this complexity that makes the word and concept so compelling. In contrast to the word house, the home is deinstitutionalized and more a feeling than anything. In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), he writes of the Hut Dream, a “valorization of a center of concentrated solitude” (32). The hut implies something primal and self-sufficient, but the hut being the warm, sincere center of inner peace and balance is essentially what we understand “home” to be. Houseness does not necessitate centralized warmth, which eggs on a semantic dissonance about what makes a house a house and a home a home. Rebsom takes this and translates the chaos into a visual experience
To describe the visual dissonance in If We Lived Here, we may look to Charles Sanders Pierce’s theory of semiotics. In contrast to his peer Ferdinand Saussure’s theory of semiotics which defined the parts of a sign to be twofold: the signifier and the signified, Pierce’s theory renamed the signifier to be the representamen and broke the signifier down into the object and the interpretant. This change is representative of Pierce’s belief in the universality of the sign: Pierce believed the only requirement for something to be considered a sign is if it is interpreted as standing for something other than itself, for example, an image, an odor, an object, can all be signs1. This belief leads Pierce to split the signifier into the object and the interpretant, offering a more personal understanding of semiotics. The representamen is the form of the concept we are trying to represent, which can be physical or not physical. Next, the interpretant is the “sense made of the sign in the mind of the observer.” Finally, we have the object which is what the sign refers to. If we used Saussure’s theory, we would only have to limit our understanding of this symbol - there would be no room for any investigations into the matter. We would have to choose between House and Home, implicitly silencing any nuance surrounding the complexities of the symbol. By using Pierce’s theory, we can more holistically study their semantic and semiotic relationships. In fig. 2, I diagram how If We Lived Here uses Pierce’s theory. In the bottom right corner is the object, or what we sense that helps us better understand the relationship between what we know the intended meaning is (the representamen, in this case, it is the original farmhouse), and how we interpret it (the interpretent - the piece itself). This can be used to guide us through how the piece operates and why it affects us. Via the original farmhouse, Rebsom sees home as “what was, what is no longer, and what may never be” and creates If We Lived Here as a visual representation of this interpretation.
This distinction is used in art to explore complicated ideas of home by manipulating the house. Returning to the shape of the house in art is used to grapple with conflicts of belonging, identity, and trauma, as detailed in Claudette Lazon’s 2017 book The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art2. She argues in much contemporary artwork, “home figures as a silent, incomplete, and unstable witness to loss.”Rebsom reaches for this in If We Lived Here, toeing the line of familiarity/unfamiliarity. The concept of the flattened house is uncanny: it follows the shape of a human home but is not one, echoing Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny as described in his essay Das Unheimliche (1919). In this essay, Freud writes,
“In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.”
What we recognize and initially take comfort in is the house shape, its (technically) functional windows, and the curtains blowing in the wind. We see shingles, wood panels, and the angle the roof makes on the body of the house. However there is more to the work that is unsettling to us. Most of this is because the house features we recognize are dysfunctional to its intended inhabitants. The angles of the house are painted on and it has no dimensioned features, providing no real shelter. The back of the house is blank (excluding the bird houses); there is no effort to continue the illusion to the other side. “Giving up” the illusion is perhaps the scariest part. We can only pretend this is a functioning house for so long and only from certain views. Without working features for us, we can no longer make any excuses for the house being imperfect because it can’t even do what it was designed to do. The billboard house is purely representational of the emotions the house holds, forcing us to face the truth about whether we see the house that is significant to us because of circumstance, or because we genuinely experienced a positive time there.
If We Lived Here asks us to consider the complicated explanation of home, showing us how we might better cope with the increasingly unstable idea of home today. The chances we have to put down roots and “settle” are quickly shrinking thanks to climate change, economic uncertainty, and an overall increase in anti-social anti-community behavior. If We Lived Here is an exercise in working not against, but alongside grief and loss to build something that is cathartic to us, but also returns something to the world around us.
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston. (1958) 2014. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. New York: Penguin Books.
Dahlstrom, Dana. 2019. “Semiotics and UID: Peircian Semiotics.” Ucsd.edu. 2019. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ddahlstr/cse271/peirce.php.
Freud, Sigmund . (1919) 2021. Das Unheimliche. Translated by Jana Srna. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/34222/pg34222-images.html.
“Home | Origin and Meaning of Home by Online Etymology Dictionary.” n.d. Www.etymonline.com. https://www.etymonline.com/word/home.
“House | Origin and Meaning of House by Online Etymology Dictionary.” n.d. Www.etymonline.com. https://www.etymonline.com/word/house.
Koch, Peter. "The pervasiveness of contiguity and metonymy in semantic change" In Current Methods in Historical Semantics edited by Kathryn Allan and Justyna A. Robinson, 259-312. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110252903.259
Lauzon, Claudette. 2017. The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art. BiblioBoard Library Catalog (Open Research Library). University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.26530/oapen_628407.
Rebsom, Paula. 2025. “If We Lived Here – Paula Rebsom.” Paularebsom.com. 2025. http://paularebsom.com/portfolio/if-we-lived-here.
Dahlstrom, Dana. 2019.“Semiotics and UID: Peircean Semiotics.” Ucsd.edu. 2019. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ddahlstr/cse271/peirce.php.
Lauzon, Claudette. The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art, University of Toronto Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newpaltz-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4838211.
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