You’re safe. I’m here.
Kelly DeVore, Lesley Jenike, Kelly Malec-Kosak
GALLERY III
Kelly Malec-Kosak, caretaketakecare, 2019, Found object, thread.
March 19 - April 17, 2022
Opening reception: Saturday, March 19 from 12-6 PM
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring work by Kelly DeVore, Lesley Jenike, and Kelly Malec-Kosak. You’re safe. I’m here. is the artists’ first collaboration in New York City.
You’re safe. I’m here. grapples with the fear, delight, and resentment embedded in the experience of mothering. Curious about the limitations of their own vantages—economic and racial privilege chief amongst them—the artists in the exhibition offer objects, videos, and archives interested in motherhood’s simultaneous indelibility and ephemerality. With particular attention to interruption as the predominant rhythm of motherhood—as well as its effects on the form and scale of work generated and on the timelines by which career trajectories are measured—the artists offer the remnants of their mother/making experiences, embroidered in memory, loss, and repetition. Resonating with pieces like Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-79), a key tension emerges—less that between motherhood and profession and more so between remembering and forgetting. What do mothers keep? What do they lose? What can’t they escape? And what, above all, do mothers make of it?
The artists, based in Columbus, Ohio, each teach at Columbus College of Art & Design.
Kelly DeVore’s work uses the past journals of her maternal grandmother, who meticulously documented the mundaneness of motherhood in Missouri in the 1960s and 70s. Tracing pages on fabric and embroidering select lines, Devore reimagines these diaries in a documentation “quilt” that features entries recording the last year of her grandfather’s life. The embroidery codes her grandmother’s memories as DeVore links them to her own experiences of loss and motherhood.
Lesley Jenike became a mother at an older age and now finds herself caught between childcare and worry over her mother’s dementia. Her lyric essay film explores the loss of memory alongside language and memory acquisition and the interruptive and repetitive nature of dementia, childcare, and art-making.
Kelly Malec-Kosak’s work reimagines her children’s clothing from their infancy. Now older, she frantically and methodically stitches as she waits and sits at doctors office appointments and drama club meetings. Documenting the waiting and worry of motherhood as an act of both meditation and rumination, the labor used to make the objects is one that references function (mending) but renders the objects unfunctional. Rather, it references the hidden labor of mothering. Time is no longer her own but caught in fleeting moments, represented in this work.
View the Press Release here.
Photography by Sebastian Bach