Ordinary Wonders
Free Events:
Opening Reception: Friday, April 4 • 5-8 PM (CT)
Curator Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 12 • 11:30 AM (CT)
In Ordinary Wonders, Jessica Labatte and Cecil McDonald, Jr. utilize the photographic medium in very different ways to illuminate the extraordinary brilliance within the everyday. Their exquisitely staged pictures made in and around domestic spaces with family, friends and objects elevate the mundane and develop quiet yet radical gestures of expansion and liberation.
Labatte’s beautifully composed still-life images, featuring flowers from her carefully tended garden alongside her children’s toys and homemade sculptures, capture the joy and wonder of everyday domestic life. At the same time, they reflect the challenges of artmaking as a working mother. Since 2020, much of Labatte’s work has evolved into a collaboration with her children, driven by the necessity of balancing parenting and her art. During the pandemic, while pregnant and parenting a toddler, she managed her role as chair of photography at Northern Illinois University, while also trying to sustain her art practice. This period led her to incorporate her child’s science and art projects into her own work. Her process and resulting artworks offer a vision of a loving, connected and playful balance for artist mothers, while also delivering a feminist critique of the world and its demands on women, particularly working artist mothers.
McDonald’s seemingly candid but carefully staged, beautifully lit, sumptuously colored, cinematic images of his family and friends expand the breadth of visual representations of Black people. In American visual culture, we most often see Black folks pictured at two extremes—either depicted as victims of violence, pain or poverty or as icons of popular culture like athletes and entertainers. Within his series In the Company of Black, McDonald positions extraordinarily ordinary pictures of Black people existing between the poles of Black misery and Black exceptionalism as a celebratory act of resistance, inclusion and representational expansion.