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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 [Kelly Malec-Kosak, Lesley Jenike, and Kelly DeVore] 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?
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.