Maternal Ecologies uses the frame of performance to recast the daily practices of early motherhood. For 3 years I reflected on, inhabited, and researched my experience of early maternal life through the FLUXUS-inspired format of the instruction piece. Year 1, Action A Day (Maternal Prescriptions) was performed for 84 consecutive days. Year 2, Action A Day (Inhabiting Firsts) was performed for 210 consecutive days. Year 3, Action A Day (Gone/There) was performed for 84 consecutive days. The project ended when my son turned 3.
Massey Klein is pleased to present The End & The Beginning, a two-person exhibition exploring themes of life and death through works on paper by Alice Gibney and Sarah Irvin.
Alice Gibney’s illustrations in The End & The Beginning are humorous explorations of humanoid and animal figures. Her characters twist, rise, dance, and praise; their movement captured through frames as if they are sequences in a stop-motion film. The charcoal, color pencil, and ink on paper drawings range in scale from 1:1 ratio of human proportions to small, intimate sketches.
Gibney’s works were created in response to a sudden and unexpected loss of a loved one. Her figurative drawings began to blur and erode as the artist’s emotional life and identity spread itself across the paper in a performative gesture of mourning and reflection. Celtic myths, slapstick humor, and Samuel Beckett became the beacons of light that shifted the artist’s perspective and made room for grief to evolve into a new tale. And so these characters were born to tell a new story: one wrought with paradoxes and clumsiness. They belong to a world that is not ours, but has the flavor of somewhere familiar. A tent, a child’s playtime sculpture, synthetic wigs, and exaggerated clothing cover their frames and become their bodies.
Gibney is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. This is her second exhibition with the Gallery.
Sarah Irvin’s graphite drawings on paper record the experience of new life and motherhood. At various times while breastfeeding, the artist created drawings that codified her daughter's action of eating. Loops go up with a suck and round down with a swallow, transcribing the unreadable language of a baby at the breast. Also while breastfeeding, Irvin used a digital program to track the start time, breast side, and duration of each feeding. From this immense amount of data, the artist created an interactive sculpture resembling a card catalogue that allows the viewer to not only review different sessions, but physically acknowledge the significant amount time and energy needed for an often unacknowledged task.
In the artist’s rocking chair series, the act of caring for a baby is codified as a form of mark-making. Pieces of graphite hung from the underside of Irvin’s glider rocking chair and created marks on a piece of paper attached to the stationary base. The series began when her daughter was born and was completed the day she turned one. Anyone who used the rocking chair during the first year of the child’s life participated in the creation of the works. In addition to the original works on paper, the Gallery will release a limited print edition of the first and last breastfeeding and rocking chair sessions as well as a small edition of breastfeeding record logs for the collector to “complete” on their own.
Irvin is an American artist who lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. This is her first exhibition with the Gallery.
Cried Milk (2018 - present)
Cried Milk uses data collected from a smartphone app to visualize what it looks like to exclusively breast pump for twelve months. Each visualization represents one month of data. The blue rings represent one hour, the change in value tracks the hours of sunlight and darkness, while the change in saturation indicates broad weather patterns (sunny versus cloudy). The straight lines each represent one day and the yellow circular bursts represent each 30-minute pumping session. The size of each circle correlates to the quantity of milk collected. This project connect to broader cultural conversations about motherhood. As infertility rates continue to skyrocket, many women experience motherhood through a similar, clinical lens. My hope is that this project gives voice to the millions of women who have struggled to become mothers and honor the under-valued labor of motherhood.
The Shape of Your Sounds (2017 - present)
Using audio surveillance technologies provided by a commercial baby monitor, I capture my baby’s cries and translate that data into visual shapes. The sound waves loop back on themselves in a 360-degree rotation. The result is vaguely reminiscent of the shape of a flower; each burst of sound looks like a petal. The initial purpose for this project was to try to find visual patterns that could be more easily interpreted. However, I quickly realized this was a fool’s game; the visual patterns are as indiscernible as his sounds. Therefore, what remains is a visual record of a moment in time; a beautiful reminder of those sleepless nights when the world was comprised of just my son and myself.
Sleep Regression (2016 – 2017)
“Sleep Regression” is a series of intimate works that were painted in the space of nap times and record the moments I watched my son while working in my home studio. The paintings’ small size and blue palette reproduce the video format and color, mimicking the tension between the close, private space of sleep and the distance created by the act of surveillance. The effects are eerie and disturbing images of rest. Lingering in the unconscious state of sleep the baby’s body looks lifeless. Are these representations of a sleeping child or a fetus? These works are thus unusual documents of baby’s first year of life–odd surrogates for the family photo album.
The gray-scale paintings, on the other hand, reinforce the reference to the sonogram, creating layers of distance. The painting series thus portrays an interesting paradox: the increasing stylistic abstraction chronicles my catharsis after years of fertility struggles as I move further away from my past sorrows, yet the works also reflect a turn inward and becomes more specific to my body (womb) and more private. The delineated forms in black, white, and grey look like the thermal imaging of a birth–drapery resembles the uterine wall, a dark ground morphs into a vaginal opening.