Utah Arts & Museums Opens “Love Hours” in
Alice Gallery
“Love Hours” is an
exhibition of artists whose work investigates motherhood in a contemporary setting.
In her poem “Candles,” Sylvia Plath describes the light on her nursing child’s
face: “I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls... How shall I tell
anything at all, to this infant still in a birth-drowse?... Tonight, like a
shawl, the mid-light enfolds her… The shadows stoop over the guests at a
christening.”
In their complexity,
such words express the feelings that emerge during the moments when parenthood
begins, when children are drowsy and vulnerable, and when the boundaries
between self and other blur as one rocks and nurses, in the darkness of night,
into the latest of hours. Such moments are, of course, fleeting and quickly
recede.
“The show is a tribute
to these moments of parenthood,” said Utah Arts & Museums Director Lynnette
Hiskey. “We’re delighted to have such wonderful artists exploring a
time-honored subject in new ways.”
Curator Laura Hurtado
said, “Some artists, like Trevor Southey, idealize the tranquility of these
love hours almost to the point of pain, examining the simultaneous burden and
privilege of holding another soul in one’s arms. Others, like husband and wife
Susan Krueger-Barber and Brad Barber, make manifest a sense of chaos that
ensues when children are young, messy, and moments are dystopian, disorienting
and confusing.”
Much of the artwork
creates visual evidence of work unseen. This is especially the case with Leah
Moses and Kelly Brooks, who take on abstraction and mark-making as a mode to
render a record, a document of one’s labor. Some of the artists take on what
Julia Kristeva calls “the enigma of gestation” and make efforts to place
motherhood in a religious and devotional position situated somewhere in
conversation with the divine, and do so by borrowing long-pervasive Madonna
conventions or goddess imagery.
Other artists seek to
disrupt such idealization and render parenthood without any efforts to idealize
it or to equate maternity with the image of a holy mother. By reconstructing
the image of the mother within a contemporary visual language, the artists take
on new feminist art practices that don’t singularly deconstruct motherhood but
rather complicate the experience outside of its traditional idealism.
The show’s title is
taken from artist Mike Kelley, whose works of worn stuffed animals sewn
together is called “More Love Hours than Can Ever be Repaid.” Many of the works
in the show are mixed media and include film, drawing, found objects, fabric,
books and sculpture. Artists include Leah Moses, Kelly Brooks, Nathan Florence,
Trevor Southey, Susan Krueger-Barber and Brad Barber.
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