Please join Lesley Art + Design as we celebrate two exhibitions at the Lunder Arts Center. On Thursday, October 19, from 6-8pm The Office of Exhibitions will be hosting an evening reception for the exhibits "The Kingdom" featuring work by Laurel Nakadate, and "Méllonece" featuring work by Elisabeth Smolarz. The reception is free, and both artists will be in attendance.
Exhibition Information:
In her series The Kingdom artist Laurel Nakadate focuses on familial histories—both real and imagined. Taking its title from the last words spoken to the artist by her mother, who died shortly after the birth of Nakadate’s son in the summer of 2016, the exhibition centers on a series of thirty-four photographs in which Nakadate envisions a physical connection between her son and his grandmother who never had the opportunity to hold him.
In the creation of this series, Nakadate hired technicians to merge photographs of her mother, spanning the course of her life, with images of her infant son. Her only direction to these technicians was to place the baby in the woman’s arms. These altered photographs imagine a history and a future that cannot exist.
Alongside the The Kingdom, Nakadate exhibits selections from her Strangers & Relations series. By utilizing genealogical testing, she discovered previously unknown family members across the US. She then wrote to distant cousins on DNA websites and soon arranged to meet them at night, in order to make their portraits. Nakadate’s subjects appeared without prior instructions, choosing their own clothing and/or props. In these portraits of strangers, Nakadate presents a newly developed and complex family album.
In the exhibition Méllocene, meaning “future memories,” Elisabeth Smolarz grapples with the current age of mass extinction faced by endangered species. Her process includes inserting information into the source codes of public domain images. The resulting photographs and videos appear fragmented, evoking the sense of artifacts unearthed by future archaeologists many centuries from now. Each piece bears titles like "Rhino. Extinct in 2025" and "Tiger. Extinct in 2029," carrying an ominous premonition of these species becoming mere memories on a planet suffering from a severe loss of animal and plant diversity.
The exhibition serves as a symbolic reminder of our disconnection from the natural world. and the underlying grief stemming from the ongoing daily loss of hundreds of plant and animal species who coexist with us on this planet.