PAC LA - Reception and Conversation with Mary Beth Heffernan and Siri Kaur

Closing Reception and Conversation with Mary Beth Heffernan and Siri Kaur

PAC LA Members - Please join us for a closing reception and conversation with Mary Beth Heffernan and Siri Kaur. Both artists are featured in the inaugural exhibition at the new PAC LA office/gallery in downtown Los Angeles. The show also features work by Alanna Airitam and Alia Malley. In addition to the opportunity to spend time with these remarkable photographers, this is the final opportunity to see these works before the exhibition ends.

Heffernan notes, "The photographs in this show were made over the course of a few years in collaboration with my dear friend and colleague, surrealist art historian Amy Lyford, after her husband Dave died in an accident. Amy asked me to make a death mask before he was cremated. Later, I asked if she’d be willing to engage with the mask in a series of photographic performances where I sought to create a visual language for her wild experience of mourning and loss: the leap of loving another across time and space; and the comingling of body and spirit that spans the boundary between life and death. The images also engage the inherent paradoxes of photography: indexical traces that touch like the death mask pictured therein; the way black and white photographs homogenize their subject matter, creating aphantasmagoric space of co-existence, mortifying the living, and vivifying the dead."

Siri Kaur's images in this show are a selection from her forthcoming book. The images collectively form a freewheeling narrative with recurring family characters growing and transforming as the pages turn. Kaur’s use of landscape and the close relationship of nature embed a sense of magical spirituality in the images. A recurring motif of water and a cast of talismanic creatures—a horse, rabbit, owl, tiny snails, a frog—punctuate the portraits, hinting at fairytale tropes and the uncanny. Thresholds between childhood, adulthood and motherhood are approached, observed and pass. Universal experiences are shown through the frame of one family—made possible by the bond between two sisters.

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1 Ticket per Member, Please!

© Siri Kaur

© Mary Beth Heffernan

© Siri Kaur

© Mary Beth Heffernan

Top Image Left © Mary Beth Heffernan

Top Image Right © Siri Kaur