Keliy Anderson-Staley Found Unfound

This autobiographical installation is about the efforts we make to construct our histories through photographs—the images that come down to us and the images we leave behind. The works in the exhibition reflect photography’s powerful narrative potential as well as its limitations and the fundamental paradox of any photograph—that it can tell us so much and nothing at the same time. The installation addresses the themes of inheritance, lineage and family lore by re-staging the artist’s search for and discovery of a biological father she only knew through a single faded photograph she lost as a teenager. This lost photograph is represented in the installation in many forms. Coincidentally, the artist met her biological father in the same year she became a parent, and the works in this exhibition reflect her anxiety about photography’s inability to really convey for her children who they are or where they come from.