Mary Kelly's Primapara, Manicure/Pedicure (1974) and Primapara, Bathing Series (1974) are included in Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, Switzerland.
The exhibition runs from 1 June to 8 September 2024.
Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family untangles some of the crucial problems, beliefs, and contradictions that the family as an institution embodies. It takes a close, critical view of family constructs across geographies, histories, and scale, providing a rare overview of contemporary art practices connected to this topic. It brings together works by more than thirty-five artist that problematize the notion of the family in its stereotypical, bourgeois representation, which has informed our visual culture for century.
Primapara (Manicure / Pedicure Series and Bathing Series) is the artist’s first moment of documenting her experience of pregnancy, childbirth and childcare prior to making Post-Partum Document. In a series of small-format black and white photographs, the visual and physical contact between mother and infant is captured, thus reflecting the complex relationship between mother and child. By sticking to a myopic and closely-cropped reproduction scheme, the artist re-creates an infant-like perspective, as though from the child to the mother, reflecting, in this way, the as yet integral unit of mother and child during the first few months of life. The oscillation inherent in these pictorial works between intimacy and aggressiveness (e. g. the nail clippers) introduces a quality rich in tensions, which lies well beyond the usual representational schemes found in infant photography.
