Redressing the Mother
Ellen McMahon

June 17 - July 5, 1997

McMahon’s work addresses the difficulties of contemporary motherhood. Through drawing, photography, found and fabricated objects and text, she explores the politics of intimacy in the mother-child relationship and the conflict between the desire for closeness and the struggle for autonomy that she sees as endemic within the family. Large format digital prints, wall text, and altered forms of cards (flash cards and playing cards) address ideas of chance, risk and play as they contradict the rationalized myth of maternal control and ultimate responsibility. All of this work speaks of the ambivalence (the overwhelming and simultaneous feelings of intimacy and longing, satisfaction and emptiness, humor and sadness, violation and trust, and desire and exhaustion), rage, resentment and powerless responsibility that are bonded to the dominant discourse of natural, if not always blissful, maternal sacrifice.

View the Press Release here.