The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center, Sarah Lawrence College is excited to announce the opening of In the Room, a group exhibition featuring four contemporary photographers: Kelly Kristin Jones, Jonathan Mark Jackson, Ashley M. Freeby, and Allie Tsubota. Through still photography, archival research, and family histories, these four artists explore the relationships between personal and collective memories, and in particular how public histories are made, challenged, and remade. Organized by Kingston-based writer and curator Frances Cathryn, the exhibition opens on January 22, 2025, on the main floor of College’s art center, home of the Visual and Studio Arts, Art History, Film History and Filmmaking Moving Image Arts programs. The exhibit will close on February 25, 2025.In the Room is funded by Sarah Lawrence College and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, and the exhibit originated at the Center for Photography at Woodstock.
Through the critical interventions by Jones, Jackson, Freeby, and Tsubota we can better understand how photographs function as social objects, in scholar Ariella Azoulay’s words, that perpetuate the power held by the people who made them.
In her series Many Thousands Gone, multimedia artist Ashley M. Freeby uses online news photographs of sites where a person of color was murdered by the state. But she has altered these found photographs by digitally erasing any evidence of brutality, such as blood, bullet casings, or caution tape. Chicago artist Kelly Kristin Jones looks at the ways in which history is memorialized by creating a vast archive of over 500 found snapshots and other vernacular photographs, each showing white women posing with monuments. She has organized these typological images around a series of different archetypes, installed in the Barbara Walters Gallery. A work from Jones’s most recent series interrogates the ways popular media—specifically lifestyle magazines and advertising—upholds the aesthetics of white femininity.
When Jonathan Mark Jackson learned that his fifth great-grandfather had published The House Servant's Directory in 1827, he spent the next several years visiting historic house museums to try to understand that lifetime of servitude. Jackson’s various self-portraits in those spaces serve as an interpretation of his ancestor’s professional role, and as a way of reclaiming the Black subject in the historical record. A work from Jackson’s most recent series explores a potential history represented by the portrait of a lone Black singer; his aim is to repair historical omissions, to hear, quite literally, from those who have been silenced in its production. During her time in residence in the Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College, Allie Tsubota will prepare two multimedia works for installation in the forthcoming group exhibition. Through video, photographs, and textual works, Tsubota will tend to the survival strategies of Asian/American intimacy and pleasure amid historical and contemporary landscapes of violence.
About the Curator
Frances Cathryn combines archival research, media theory, and social design to recontextualize American cultural narratives. Her cultural criticism on topics ranging from the myth of American exceptionalism to marginalized historical landscapes has been featured in such publications as Frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTnews, the Brooklyn Rail, and Social Text journal. She currently manages editorial projects at Forge Project, where she coordinates publications, advises writers-in-residence, authors a monthly newsletter, and leads its digital-first journal, Forging.
Heimbold Visual Arts Center HEIM 200 Heimbold Gallery
Open to the public
/ Tuesday