Make your mother

The maternal relationship is one fraught with complications that are relational and ever-changing. This exhibition examined the ways that dependency and responsibility between mother and child can shift through circumstance and time. Each artist considered the absence of the mother’s body and ruminated on themes of love, disdain, and mortality in works created specifically for this exhibition. Lauren Cardenas createed “prints” by asking her mother to sleep on top of thin sheets of paper, leaving behind the residue of her rest—namely sweat, saliva, chocolate, and Capri menthol 100s. Nic King Ruley neutralized the personal signifiers of his mother’s body by creating a sculpture with her image, her urine, and the sound of her heartbeat. Karol Shewmaker charted a year spent with her mother in the pages of a book that begin the day following her father’s death. Within these very personal works, the artists contend with how identity is conflated and separated from the mother by engaging non-traditional materials and meticulous acts of making.

Tell me a story about your mother, an interactive drawing performance by Caitlin Metz, invited gallery visitors to tell a story about their mother while they created blind contour portraits of each storyteller. These drawings were posted on the gallery wall and kept there until the exhibition was deinstalled.

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