How does one mourn someone they never knew?
How do we grieve something we have already grieved?
What do you do when a stranger slides you a pink Victoria’s Secret bag across a nondescript gray office table containing your father’s ashes? And then asks for your credit card.
DADDY is born out of the recent suicide of artist Jenn Sova’s estranged father, leaving her the position of next of kin. When we live in a culture that is dominated by fantasies and expectations of kin, of families, of father, what does it mean to navigate outside that?
DADDY presents more questions than it does answers.
DADDY is built around Sova’s lived experience and imagination, examining complex loss, fatherhood, death, and the possibility of healing.
DADDY is an offering of works that attempt to respond to the gray matter of estranged loss.
DADDY is a space of ritual; of making a space for the nebulous, the queer. DADDY is the demarcation of spaces for what we want in our lives and what we don’t.
What can be built from loss?
Sova is reckoning with someone she never knew. Through the reordering of materials- cinder blocks, media, stains, and light- she is contracting a new histories of DADDIES.
Who is a Daddy? What even is a Daddy?
How do you see your relationship to DADDY as a term, as a person, as a feeling, is yours. Know that while this exhibition evokes a personal working-through of grief and complexity, you are invited to consider your own relationship to DADDY.