PITTSBURGH, PA.- Mattress Factory presents Home Is Not A Place (2026) by Akea Brionne. Known for her figurative, wall-based work, Brionne takes a significant step into architectural-scale installation, using textile, structure, and place to deepen our understanding of permanence and home.

"I was eight years old when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. It was my first true understanding that the concept of home could disappear. As Louisiana continues to lose land, I find myself reckoning with the possibility that my home could one day become a myth, like Atlantis.

What unsettles me about Atlantis is that we no longer know whether it was ever there. Its existence is contested; a place has become a story, passed down through generations, suspended somewhere between history and myth.

I wonder what it would mean for the place I come from to be known only by future generations through photographs, objects, recipes, music, smells, oral histories, and the memories of people who can say, '"I was there."

Akea Brionne

Like fragments of a life, the materials that comprise domestic spaces carry distinct histories, associations, and meanings. In parallel to her work, Brionne will soon move from Detroit, MI, to Pittsburgh, PA. Over the duration of the exhibition, additions will be made to the installation, a process of “moving in” that mirrors her own repeated experience.

The focal point of Brionne’s exhibition is a monumental rowhouse, standing alone. Defined by their place in a continuous row, rowhomes exist as both discrete dwellings and collective structures. By separating the rowhome into a standalone textile structure and threshold, Brionne highlights the interplay between dependence and independence; identity shaped not by sameness, but by the relationships between transitions.

Akea Brionne is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist, working at the intersection of lens- and fiber-based media. Her practice explores the relationship between colonial and imperialist history and their impact on identity politics, cultural storytelling, memory, and assimilation. Her work analyzes this primarily through the observation within the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis on Creole culture.

Brionne received a dual BA/BFA in Photography and Humanistic Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She received an MFA in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Brionne (b. 1996, New Orleans, LA) currently lives and works in Detroit, MI.