Opening: Friday, December 6, 6 – 9pm
Gallery hours: Friday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm or by appointment

Structures of Feeling is a group exhibition featuring Jamil Baldwin, Janna Ireland, Arlene Mejorado,
Luis Motta, Adee Roberson, Polo Silk, Jennifer Teresa Villanueva and Al-Ameen Archives organized by
Keko Jackson. It considers works that are made using family photographs as material and the afterlives of these images as they move from in-to-outside the home.

Historically, photographs have played a role in affirming family values. As a tool they have been
implicated in the standardization of the nuclear model which includes its familial structures, roles, values
and aesthetics. Despite any single definition, families can sometimes be a sustaining or punishing
institution, but they are always constitutive. Inside the home, the photos may act as highly social devices
actively constructing memories and relationships in order to come to terms with one perspective of living,
eventually growing to become important sources for a material and affective understanding of history.

A comprehensive history however is never the aim of the family photograph or album. Individual stories
in and of themselves aren’t right or wrong, but we run a risk when just considering a single version. In
their afterlives, these images together can complement or complicate the past and bring forth insights
from the average and ordinary. Disconnected from their original sources they become reinterpreted as
cultural texts—cultural not just informed by an economic base, but collectively produced over time.
Raymond Williams shares the phrase “structure of feeling” which helps to describe the impact of the
afterlives of family photographs and how feelings are evoked in a belated but emergent stage as both
social and material. Feelings that suggest an incoherency that instead must be inferred by reading between the lines.

The works in this exhibition challenge us to find other ways to talk about photography and the problem of
interpretation. Together they acknowledge, explore and trouble cultural genealogies as well as systems of
value, familial and otherwise, both locally and globally. What these images guarantee is something
unpreservable in that they are unable to do what we want. They cannot preserve the things we want them
to and at some point, both the image and the memory will be gone.

D says the image of the ocean is lodged in her, coming from Guayaguayare at the southernmost tip of
Trinidad. Coming from the northwest corner of a four-way intersection in Wayne, Pennsylvania, I wonder
what image is lodged in me. -Christina Sharpe

The exhibition will include a screening of short films organized by Andrea C. Nieto and Emilianna
Vazquez exploring related topics. The screening will take place Saturday, December 14 at 6pm, with the
program of titles forthcoming. It will be free and open to the public with a suggested donation of $10.