Rydel Cerezo | Anqiue Jordan | Anna Kasko | Meryl McMaster | Cheryl Mukherji | Dainesha Nugent-Palache | Birthe Piontek | Silvia Rosi

Family Album explores the power of image-making in relation to a fundamental social unit: the family. Many people’s first experience of being photographed is by and with their parent or guardian. Traditional family photographs, in which the sitters are captured within their home, surrounded by objects of pride, and dressed in their finest, not only have come to define the way subjects wish to present themselves but also are complicit in generating an idea of how a family should appear. The local, national, and international artists in this exhibition reveal the family as a social construct and use the camera as a mechanism by which to better understand their own personal histories and familial relationships. They mine the visual language of family photographs and use these tropes and conventions to explore the emotional weight of ancestral affiliations.

By turning their lens on their families, themselves, and objects of personal significance, as well as through using found photographs, the artists in this exhibition make visible the intimate, imperfect, and sometimes difficult relationships that characterize our connection to those deemed to be closest to us. The works ask viewers to reflect upon the limits of the knowledge of others obtained through images, including those with whom we are deeply familiar. In using photography to explore the family unit the works in Family Album together present a study of what is possible for a photograph to convey.