MOTHERS IN ARMS
by Alon Goldsmith
Harnessing the universal power of photography, Mothers in Arms pays tribute to victims and survivors of gun violence through a series of images that bring into focus the trauma that endures long after the trigger has been pulled.
The primary goal of Mothers in Arms is to catalyze a shift in people’s responses to the travesty of rampant gun ownership in the U.S. The series features hard-hitting triptychs comprising portraits of mothers with a meaningful personal item, archival photographs of mother and child, and photographs of their burial sites or memorials. The five triptychs featured on this site are just a beginning of what will be an extensive visceral visual record of the thousands of unnecessary deaths caused by gun violence each year.
​
CONDUIT
by Doug Safranek
​
The name Conduit derives from the fact that we’re all conduits for our Mothers’ stories; every one of us is a child of a woman and we each carry our mother’s stories in our memory. Through our telling, these stories can be imparted to future generations.
​
​
The central focus of the exhibition will be a wall tapestry made up of egg tempera portraits, arranged like the squares of a large quilt. Quilts are a traditional art form found in most cultures around the globe;
they have principally been created by women. In more recent times, quilts have been adopted by movements as symbols of protest and solidarity—the AIDS quilt is a notable example.
​
The tempera portraits will be accompanied by video stories shown on a large screen in which the subjects of the portrait quilt tell a story from their mothers’ life in the first person. Juxtaposing portraits created in a meticulous, ancient medium with stories quickly recorded on readily available video conferencing software creates a certain dynamic tension. Shown above are just a few of the portraits on display.
​
Installation is planned to be featured in New York, at a date TBD.
​
​