While viewing the Eternal Maternal exhibit in the lobby of the historic Kelly Strayhorn Theater, I thought about the months I spent puzzling through a sudden, intense desire to have a baby with my partner after over 20 years of wanting to do just about anything other than be pregnant/give birth. This new prospect fell somewhere along the spectrum of the impractical to the improbable and was the most visceral puzzling I — who has always preferred to intellectualize my feelings rather than actually feel them — have ever experienced. It was, in turns, beautiful and difficult and magical. So, really, maternal in its own way.
Displayed in the BOOM Gallery, Eternal Maternal features work by interdisciplinary artists Fran Flaherty and Meg Foley and was curated by DS Kinsel, cofounder of BOOM Concepts. A press release describes it as “center[ing] motherhood both as an active pursuit and a fundamental state of existence, irrespective of and subject to gender … illuminating the inherent connection between mothering and the sacred.”
Eternal Maternal, on view through Sun., Dec. 17, marks the third season for the BOOM Gallery since it opened in September 2022. Liz Rudnick, KST’s director of development and communications, says the aim of the space is “promoting artists of color, queer artists, [and] artists who relate to the mission of the theater as a whole.”
Flaherty, a Pittsburgh-based Deaf artist, and first-generation Filipino immigrant, contributes pieces from her Anthropology of Motherhood project, described as an "ongoing curation of artwork and design that engages in the complex visual, material, emotional, corporeal and lived experiences of motherhood, care-giving, parenting, nurturing and maternal labor." For the work on display here, Flaherty started with a flatbed scanner to capture the form of unusable breastmilk. The results take two forms: four images magnified and mounted on silk and three 3D-printed objects.
The images — done primarily in browns — belie their origin. Two are veritable Rorschach tests (I saw unidentifiable mythical creatures, for whatever that says about where my mind was that day). Another could very well be a rock (put a pin in rocks) and the last is golden and yonic, the closest the exhibit gets to explicitly feminine imagery. (Let it not be said that my women’s studies minor went to waste for being able to pull "yonic" from the recesses of my brain.) The three objects are 3D renderings of these images and are made from gold PLA filament.
Though framed, the silk is not pulled taut, evoking breasts deflated after nursing and/or the soft terrain of a postpartum abdomen. I was particularly taken by this detail, perhaps more than anything else, and was left thinking about the way pregnancy and birth transform bodies in ways both exceedingly public and tenderly private. (This line of thinking only made me angrier than I already am that there’s a sizable portion of the unrelenting beauty industry dedicated to convincing women that this transformation is something to be reversed.)
Regardless, the pieces are striking. They’re not very large — roomy in their six-inch-by-six-inch acrylic encasements. The ridges inherent in 3D printing enhance the rock-like forms (we’re not done with rocks yet) and allow for shadow and sparkle alike. It’s probably good there was a “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH” directive next to them because, wow, did I want to. They could have been the perfect fidget item during those months of puzzling, seemingly endless lines and bumps and ways the light could reflect.
Foley, a queer artist from Philadelphia, goes in the other direction from Flaherty, presenting something that should be solid and rough but is instead fabric-smooth and flowing. "Primordial," a 30-minute looped video from Foley's Blood Baby project focused on queer and trans parents, unfolds on two screens. In it, Foley performs what they call "rock drag," dancing dressed as a fabric boulder. The video and accompanying sound — headphones provide the ambient noise of the water-background landscape — are by Foley’s partner and co-parent Carmichael Jones.
The exhibit text describes Foley’s dancing as “connecting geology, transformation, and queer gestation.” The conceptual juxtaposition of geology and parenting recalls the adage about raising small children: the days are long and the years are short. (Anyone who has spent the day with a dysregulated three-year-old knows that geological eras pass by faster than those hours before bedtime.) So, too, the way generations accumulate to create a geologic time all their own, the strata of ancestors that make us who we are.
Here’s another thought that is less about geology and more about, I guess, rock drag: how parenting has only served to further obscure my public queerness as a cis femme lesbian. This is a thought I have often, but it’s the first time I’ve identified with a dancing fabric rock while having it. Flaherty and Foley, in their own distinct ways, manage to capture motherhood as it truly looks and feels, using abstraction and movement to loosen and redefine a rigidly, often oppressively defined role.
Eternal Maternal. Continues through Sun., Dec.17. Kelly Strayhorn Theater. 5941 Penn Ave., East Liberty. kelly-strayhorn.org
Kelly Strayhorn Theater presents a mother of an art show with Eternal Maternal
