Frontispace is pleased to announce Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, a solo exhibition of works by Ahndraya Parlato. In Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, Ahndraya Parlato uses the life-changing events of her mother’s suicide and the birth of her children as the genesis for an expansive project exploring the contradictory and complex conditions of motherhood. The resulting image-text book threads the political and historical with the deeply personal, bringing together narratives from across genres and generations to create a nuanced and compelling body of work. Interwoven with her own writings are still lives, sculptures, photograms made from her mother’s ashes, and reenactments of 19th century ‘hidden mother’ images. Included amongst these are Parlato’s photographs of her children, who are shown with both a fidelity to maternal intimacy and a more distanced contemplation. Within this complexity Parlato strives to find clarity around the essential questions of parenthood, mortality, and gender. Are her contemporary fears any different than the fears felt by mothers throughout history? Which anxieties are specific to having female children? And how is motherhood itself a construction?
Ahndraya Parlato is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has a BA from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Ahndraya has published three books, including: Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and, The Photographer’s Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Ahndraya has exhibited work at: Spazio Labo, in Bologna, Italy, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, PA, The Aperture Foundation, New York, NY, and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at The Visual Studies Workshop and Light Work, and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient. Additionally, Ahndraya has been a nominee for the ICP Infinity Award, the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam, and the SECCA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She teaches at The Rochester Institute of Technology.
http://ahndrayaparlato.com