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 in 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 constructing a new histories of DADDIES. 

Who is Daddy? What even is a Daddy? 

How 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. 

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after/time, artist Jenn Sova, and co-curators Graham Feyl and Laurel V. McLaughlin present DADDY. Join us for an in-person opening reception on Friday, May 6th, from 6:00–9:00 pm, with artist performance, Gray Matter, at sundown. 

Additional programming to include:
A Tender Outline
Sunday, May 22nd 3:00–4:30pm PST

a collection of readings and responses relating to fathers, grief, media, and queerness. Readings will be from local and national artists, writers, and musicians. This hybrid program will take place virtually as well as at after/time.