My mom is an art teacher, so I’ve had no choice but to be surrounded by art my whole life. Every family vacation, my mom made a point of scoping out the nearest art museum and marching me and my brother through the exhibits. She spent hours quizzing us on the likes of Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, explaining the differences between realism and surrealism and putting museum tour guides to shame. She skipped the whole Disney princess nonsense and instead taught me to idolize Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The image is this: a gender-ambiguous figure stands in the desert facing the camera. They hold binoculars to their face, looking to some horizon over our shoulder. There’s a placelessness to the setting, which is made up of no more than sand, clouds and sky. No details or ornament in the figure’s dress bind it to any particular time period. It’s universal.

As the always-eccentric and never-homogenous fans at The Ark crowded into the venue, my friend and I wondered what this performance held in store for us. The Jill Jack Annual Birthday Bash had a relaxed energy that made it easy to converse with other audience members about the impending show — the couple in front of us loved Jill Jack so much that they had come to see her for the past three years.

Over the years, returning home for break has seemed to feel more and more like returning to a state of limbo. At first, my homecoming felt like a return to form, or something familiar. I was only out of high school for a few months, and home still felt the way it should. But, after spending most of my time in Ann Arbor for the past three years, something about going back to my hometown feels slightly off. Either way, after a long fall semester, having two weeks to do nothing in particular sounded pretty nice.