Posted on
2021-09-20
For the last two decades, American artist Gillian Laub has used the camera to investigate how society’s most complex questions are often writ large in our most intimate relationships. Her focus on family, community and human rights is clear in projects such as Testimony (2007), which explores the lives of terror survivors in the Middle East, and Southern Rites (2015), a decade-long project about racism in the American South.
Throughout her career she has been simultaneously, and privately, documenting the emotional, psychological, and political landscape of her own family—exploring her growing discomfort with the many extravagances that marked their lives. Intense intergenerational bonds have shaped and nurtured Laub, but have also been fraught. Balancing empathy with critical perspective, humor with horror, the closeness of family with the distance of the artist, Laub offers a picture of an American family saga that feels both anguished and hopeful.
Opposite – Grandpa helping Grandma out, 1999
Exhibition runs through to January 10th, 2022
ICP Museum
79 Essex Street
New York
NY 10002
www.icp.org
