push/pull

Lindsay Buchman, Stephanie Slate, and Kate McCammon

October 4 - October 30, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, October 4, 2024

Curated by Olivia Horwitz and Mario Cabral
Hosted by Blah Blah Gallery - Annex Space
907 Christian Street, Philadelphia PA 19147

push/pull brings together the work of Lindsay Buchman, Stephanie Slate, and Kate McCammon, which explores the nuanced relationship one can have to formative people and places as a result of the contexts that precede and follow the inception of those connections. 

Lindsay Buchman’s screenprints, leveraging archival materials and location-specific image-making, reconcile her upbringing in Orange County with its violent history of transgression and discrimination. Buchman’s work contains deceivingly tranquil and halcyon images of nature from her childhood that point to a nefarious past and present of landholdings, subdivisions, and conservatism. Buchman maps the relationship between home, place, and belonging and interrogates Orange County’s intertwinement with racism. Positive memories and associations of place confront feelings of uneasiness and otherness associated with the familiar landscapes in these works. 

Stephanie Slate also investigates this condition of connect/disconnect, using alternative and historical processes in photography and printmaking to examine loss, death, the afterlife, and the Unknown. Slate visually discusses the lineage of birth and death and explores her fear of losing herself to motherhood, as well as losing her daughter. Working in layers and using abstract imagery of herself and her daughter, Slate depicts incomplete figures floating between a state of real and imagined. Her work reminds us that the line between reality and the subconscious can be blurred when the self detaches physically and emotionally from the earthly world.  

Lastly, Kate McCammon, surveying identity and memory through photo collage, combines fragmented old family photos and personal journal pages with ghostly, silhouetted portraits to process grief and heal from the loss of her father. McCammon connects her father’s experiences to her own and draws parallels between those experiences and the lives that surrounded them, as captured in photographs and the written word. The prominence of blue calls back to the intimate settings and surroundings of juvenescence. Her work highlights the duality of documentation – fragile like human existence and concurrently instrumental in solidifying memory in such a way that transcends materiality. 

In push/pull, each artist grapples with the potent and oftentimes conflicting feelings they have about self-identity, kinship, and acceptance, allowing complex memories and lived experiences to peacefully coexist in one harmonious site.