In his brilliant 2012 book “Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” Andrew Solomon posits a theory of “vertical” and “horizontal” identities. Vertical identities are inherited through lineage; that is, from the expectations of parents, culture and ethnicity, socio-economic status and so on. But, especially for children with physical, mental and social disabilities and differences, there is a horizontal identity that radically diverges from the vertical one, upsetting perceived societal notions of balance.

Society’s knee-jerk response is to somehow “correct” or “mainstream” this haecceity, which pathologizes difference and concretizes hierarchies of “normal” to preserve the status quo. My experience is that this is a universal condition, even for children who come from loving, supportive families. We all have ways in which we inhabit a space outside of the norm, and the larger world’s bewilderment of it and attempts to quash or rationalize it create painful wounds in children that can range from awkwardness in one’s own skin to full-blown neuroses.

That situation is poignantly and, often, agonizingly on view in “Jona Frank: Model Home,” a conceptually sumptuous four-room installation on view at Bowdoin College Museum of Art through June 5.

The more time one spends in these galleries, the more we appreciate the astonishing level of detail Frank has conjured to narrate the story of her childhood growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It also attests to the power of memory and to the indelible psychic imprints left by parents who, constricted by their own ideas of how things should be – and by the aspirations they often live out through their children – unconsciously stultify the natural life force of their offspring.

In the catalog for the exhibition – a quirky hybrid of essays, interviews and autobiography – Anne Collins Goodyear (co-director, with husband Frank Goodyear, of the museum) describes Frank’s mother Rose as a “towering presence” and Jona Frank’s relationship with her as “the struggle of a young woman to survive the crushing pressures of the alienating mythologies of hyperfemininity and hyperdomesticity represented by her domineering mother.”

Frank’s primary medium is photography, and she fills the galleries with large-format images in vivid, lusciously saturated colors. They depict meticulously conceived tableaux in which the actress Laura Dern plays Rose and three actresses stand in for Frank at different ages.

But the installation is much more than just the photography. Frank worked with designer Alex Kalman to create an immersive experience intended to replicate the suffocating environment of the Cherry Hill house, a doll-sized reproduction of which centers one of the galleries. If we peer into the house through its tiny windows, we see actual home movies from Frank’s childhood. The rest of the images are, enthrallingly, creative artifice that points to the performative nature of our personalities, which do what is called for, not always what is felt. Kalman and Frank also collaborated with other people – from graphic artists to a pastry chef – on different aspects of the installation.

Entering the gallery triggers the ring of a wall phone hanging to our right. This device kicks off the story of Frank’s childhood, beginning in elementary school, when her teacher phoned Rose to say that young Jona refused to draw anything in art class. Dern’s Rose, clad in a bright, daisy-print house dress, looks upset and concerned. She has been clipping coupons at the kitchen table. But right away we notice something’s off: the scissors are bizarrely, lethally large, and Rose’s dress matches the wallpaper.

We read in “Cherry Hill,” the similarly hybridized catalog accompanying the first phase of this project, that once Rose hung up with the art teacher, Frank tried to explain herself saying, “The paper is perfect. I like looking at it and don’t want to ruin it.” To which Rose, who clearly clung to her propriety as a way of keeping her fragile instability at bay, responded, “When your class goes to the art room, you will draw something on the paper. I do not want to get a call from the school AGAIN!” And, so, the horizontal identity is exposed …and the stifling of it begins.

We feel Frank’s isolation, and the constant frustration of her helpless struggle to be seen for who she is, repeatedly throughout the galleries. There is an image of her as Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter,” standing outside a shingled colonial house wearing a prim dress that, like in Hawthorne’s novel, is emblazoned with an “A.” (In the “Cherry Hill” book, this image follows Frank’s retelling of a 10th-grade episode when she asked a boy to see the movie “Poltergeist” with her and Rose reacted “as if I had offered him my virginity.”) In the photograph, Frank twitches uncomfortably on a makeshift stage as eight incarnations of Rose look on from every angle disapprovingly. It hurts to look at this picture.

Photos of re-created interactions between Frank and her mother, Rose, in “Model Home.”

There are tense scenes between mother and daughter in the car and at the table in the daisy-wallpapered room. A particularly excruciating sequence records an argument in Rose’s bedroom where, finally, Frank retreats, head bowed in shame, and looks back at her mother, who is irretrievably lost in her own disappointment. There are few words throughout the installation, but here the message is heartbreaking: “I was her good luck charm. I was so scared, I shook. I could not tell her the truth.”

Toile wallpapers by Aleix Pons Oliver function as further narrative tools. Looking closely, we realize these are bizarre fusions of images from Frank’s memory – of her first communion, sitcoms she watched, news reports that came through the television, works of art that influenced her. There are crucifixes in trees from which Virgin Mary figures dangle like Christmas ornaments. Under another tree, Patty Hearst wields her gun next to Henry Winkler’s clueless character “The Fonz” from the television show “Happy Days.” In another toile pattern, Frank stands, her head and shoulders thrust into a simulacrum of the Cherry Hill split-level house, effectively reinterpreting “Femme Maison,” Louise Bourgeois’s famous sculptural critique of domesticity.

In the final room of the “Model Home” installation, a table laden with cakes made by Eggy Ding of Rose Foods in Portland spell out “You Are Not Enough.”

By the time we reach the final room – dominated by a wall-sized lightbox image showing the aftermath of a disastrous joy ride Frank and her friends took in an irresponsible young adult’s convertible – much has happened. There has been a birthday party at a table laden with cakes made by Eggy Ding (pastry chef at Rose Foods in Portland) that spell out “You Are Not Enough.” Frank’s brother Mark, a gay man who less successfully navigated his conservative Catholic upbringing than Frank did, has had two nervous breakdowns (he eventually died of an overdose). And the house on Garfield Avenue in Cherry Hill has been incinerated by fire, which feels like a kind of exorcism.

Sound dramatic? It is … thrillingly. But there are moments of absurd humor too. And one room, titled “Open Road,” deals with Frank’s eventual escape from the asphyxiating confines of Cherry Hill. My reaction to this room was to take in an enormous breath, to fill my lungs to capacity because I could. Which points to the power of Frank’s ability to tell her story of confinement and release, maternal mental instability and personal emotional health, conflict and resolution. It is the process every one of us – beautifully and inescapably – is engaged in for our entire life: illumination, healing, reconciliation, understanding, compassion and, with any hope, peace.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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