Situated within the multimedia artists' historic San Francisco flat, Danielle Mourning has created a stunningly reflective, seven room, living breathing art installation dossier entitled, StayWithMe. A welcome note and guide describing each work is left at the door's entrance where Mourning invites guests to enter and wander her home at their own pace. Mourning sits in the final 'Mama Pink Room' where she is in performance at the typewriter compiling letters from each visit (now over two thousand).

You are entering a living breathing altar which ephemerally informs the visitor that something both haunting and sacred exists within the walls of her home. Guests voices turn to a whisper as they walk up the gold leafed stairs headed toward a hand painted glass window as you then bend a corner entering The Blue Landing with a floating quartz light sculpture above. One can view and hear Mourning from a distance behind a broom curtain typing in the final room which she asks you to enter only after you have toured all six other rooms of the installation. Each sense is heightened be it smell (incense, candles and cookies baking in the oven), sound (recordings of birds, nostalgic music and a 1950s housewife on Acid coming from a video in the closet), texture (seven hundred pounds of volcanic earth on the floor of the 'Ancestor Room' and a twelve by nine foot wall of collected feathers from Mournings' favorite beach in the Marin Headlands) and taste if you dare bite into the cookie and candy tempting you on the 'Hippie Boat Kitchen' counter. The memory of entangled family stories immediately dislodges echoes from a part of oneself you thought you may have forgotten- and that is only the beginning.

Mourning was born in San Francisco in 1976. Though she fled as a teenager only to return in her early thirties after graduate school in London, the history and expansive nature afforded by growing up in such an exquisite area has had an enduring hold on Mourning's creative work. Attempting to abandon her childhood home by living and working in other parts of the world, Mourning learned that her family, ancestors and the trauma they experienced and inflicted continued to live alongside her. Mourning thus returned home untangling her knotted web and digging up the roots for the last fourteen years. It was not until Mourning's stomach broke down for months that she viscerally learned how trauma remains and manifests itself within the body unless it is released. With the help of a healer who kept repeating three words, Stay-With-Me, Mourning broke through what some may call, the dark night of the Soul. Mourning vowed to remember every download she envisioned when lying awake each night for months within her home turned installation. Mourning also committed to completing ideas that were left untouched for years within boxes because there was always someone else to take care of.

Through a series of remarkable and poetic mirrored reflections, altars, vignettes, muralled episodes and illustrated journals, Stay with Me distills the artist’s revulsion yet obsessive curiosity surrounding childhood pain, our bodies' cellular memory and the nature of domesticity. This installation offers an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of intimacy, isolation, voyeurism, both female and family role identity and the critical nature of healing. Mournings' work provides a sustained look at how home and its atmosphere can take possession of our innermost self. Walls quite literally begin to tell our story thus dictating how we witness ourselves. This installation is an immersive, emotional, and intellectually rigorous examination of the everyday feminine in art and life and how the impact of familial trauma constantly confronts us whether we choose to look or not. Trauma brought into the light is an inheritance of overwhelming creativity and the greatest source for healing as Mourning openly discusses. Our emotional interior which normally remains safely contained, is afforded a time and place of reclamation and reflection within Stay with Me. What unveils within this home is the universal human desire to stay with and trust ourselves no matter how far away we may have escaped. Mournings' visual story is an indelible reminder to turn toward our own.