A hole’s made of itself 

Filter Photo is pleased to present A hole’s made of itself, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Priya Kambli and Mel Keiser. This intimate exhibition explores the relationship of self to society, family, and ultimately self. Working with photography in visually distinct ways, both artists examine the role they play in the larger arena of the social construct of self, desiring to reconcile identity and relationships within a kind of personal void. Kambli and Keiser respectively use mark making, patterning, objects, and installation to disrupt the indexical quality of the photograph and re-contextualize identity along new avenues of personal narrative.

 

Priya Kambli’s work in this exhibition is from her Kitchen Gods series, “Before I emigrated my sister and I split our photographic inheritance arbitrarily and irreparably in half – one part to remain in India with her and the other to be displaced along with me, here in America. For the past decade this archive of my family photographs has been one of my main source materials in creating bodies of work, which explore the genre of personal narrative. In my work I re-contextualize the familial qualities of these materials for my own artistic and creative purposes, but also as a way of embellishing my past and connecting it to the present.”

 

Mel Keiser’s work looks at self-identity through the lens of concepts borrowed from quantum physics, ontology, and philosophy—concepts like viscosity, non-locality, and interobjectivity. In her work, self-identity becomes a force flowing to warp the world around her; an average of undulating potentialities; and an enmeshed system of shifting contexts and perspectives. Her pieces in A hole’s made of itself blend the indexes of family photos and domestic spaces, multiplying the number of selves Keiser represents as she investigates the intorted and recursive question: is identity a unity or a system of discrete selves?

On View: December 2 – December 31, 2016

Location: Filter Space | 1821 W Hubbard St, Suite 207

Filter Photo is proud to acknowledge the support of the David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events in producing this exhibition.