Curatorial Projects
Collaborating with kelly kristin jones and local Kingston youth to produce images that hide or cover local monuments in Academy Green May 2023.
Approach
The model laid out by scholars Laura Wexler, Ariella Azoulay, and others in their recent book, Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, is the approach I bring to my curatorial work. Collaboration, as described in the text, can be both a “theoretical proposition and a pedagogical tool” for studying photography. Through this lens, the editors invite the reader to understand the technology and its use “under different terms” than its histories of violence and indifference suggest. My curation has, and will continue to be, collaborative as defined by these conditions.Recent projects
In the Room, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Kingston, New York, June–July 2023
In my most recent curatorial project, In the Room at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in Kingston, I brought together three photo-based artists whose works exploit the medium of photography to challenge the ways we document and remember. Using still photography, archival research, family histories, and digital-editing tools, the artists explore the relationships between personal and collective memories and how they are made, challenged, and remade. Through the critical interventions by Kelly Kristin Jones, Jonathan Mark Jackson, and Ashley M. Freeby, we can better understand how photographs function as social objects that perpetuate the power held by the people who made them. This exhibition is traveling to the Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College in January 2025.
Read the exhibition brochure online.
Jonathan Mark Jackson, Stamp (2019), from The House Servant’s Directory series.
Ashley M. Freeby, Many Thousands Gone, 2017–ongoing.
Kelly Kristin Jones, nice white ladies, installation of unique found photographs.
Upcoming exhibitions
The Middle Distance, the Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, New York, Jan–April 2025
The middle ground or middle distance in the composition of an image is neither background nor foreground, neither very close nor very far away. It is a depth within the frame at which past and future are implied. While the middle ground is the most common framing and considered a “respectful” distance (especially in documentary photography) it is also often criticized as causing a scene to appear flat or static.
For The middle distance, artist Kelly Kristin Jones explores the idea of a social “middle ground,” a place where one can gain status while avoiding accountability, what historian Laura Wexler might call the “averted eye.” White women in particular have historically maintained a posture at middle distance: Always just close enough to exert influence but never putting themselves or their reputations in harm’s way. In Nice white ladies, installed in the center of the gallery, Jones has collected hundreds of vernacular images that showcase the lengths white women will go to access power at a remove.
White women have also used this middle ground to preserve a singular, politically salient retelling of American history. In 1908, a matriarch of a local carpet-milling family used her wealth to save Philipse Manor, the second-oldest building in the county and now house museum. In a special collaboration installed in the gallery, Jones and students at Sarah Lawrence will use the museum’s collections to consider how visual culture participates in political discourse. By taking an activist approach to interrogating the archive, Jones aims to make dominant historical knowledge more participatory. This exhibition is funded through a grant by the Mellon Foundation.