Jul 21st 2019

Gallery KIN will host a closing event for SECOND-HAND: Adrián García Orozco and Jennifer Sova, on Sunday, July 21, from 12:00 to 3:00 pm.

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During the event we will be scanning on-site as part of Jennifer Sova’s “men with children” living archive of found photographs! Anyone wanting to contribute their own photographs of men with children – printed or digital – are encouraged to do so.

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Also, Gallery KIN has a friend across the hall: Occasional Gallery, run by Erika Råberg. Occasional Gallery will open their second exhibition at the same time, “still is still moving”, featuring works by a dear friend to Gallery KIN, Austin-based artist Betelhem Makonnen.

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Something can’t be handed down until a certain amount of time has passed. Artists Adrián García Orozco and Jennifer Sova both work with these kinds of objects, heirlooms that have been held by one set of hands, lived with and enjoyed, then given a second life through ownership by the next generation. The nature of inheritance however connotes loss within a gain, and as evidenced in “SECOND-HAND” this exchange can be more full and rich than an object’s humble beginnings could ever have promised, or lacking and incomplete.

Adrián García Orozco’s short film “La Piel de las Almas” begins with a stop-motion sequence of smooth pebbles self-arranging on the flat surface of a metate, one that belonged to Orozco’s own grandmother, immediately bringing the viewer into the domestic space of a revered matriarch. Whimsical anecdotes are told through documentary style first-person narratives and interspersed with vignettes of inanimate objects that come to life to perform a filial memory. An alarm clock, wool mouse, and the capital of a column are imbued with the values of those who used them, reminding loved-ones in the present how to live and eventually focusing their attention on the beauty within loss and their own mortality.

Jennifer Sova’s ongoing collection of found photographs in “men with children” accumulate around the one snapshot in her possession that features she and her own father. In the absence of a lifetime of memories, Sova’s photograph and the others in her collection are mysterious pieces of evidence to be analyzed. In Sova’s words, “men have been allowed to be absent in the raising of children in our society for centuries, so my story isn’t unique, but that makes these images of men with children stand out.” The images and their closeness in appearance to their referents show more to the uninitiated than Orozco’s clock, mouse, and capital, however the chasm the viewer is left with in the absence of context is palpable. Next to “men with children”, the touch and memory in “La Piel de las Almas” brings an even finer point to the distance and ambiguity of the purely photographic index.

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Adrián García Orozco (León, México) is a stop motion animator with a background in communication with emphasis in audiovisual production. MA in Visual and Critical Studies for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also a musical practice that combines regularly with his filmmaking.

Jennifer Sova is an artist, organizer, and arts advocate. Her interdisciplinary art practice is an exploration of masculinity, loss, and identity through photography, video, and performance. Sova is the founder and director of The Overlook, a mission-driven nomadic arts project. She currently splits her time between Chicago and Bloomington, Indiana.

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