Ahndraya Parlato, “Untitled”, from the series Who is Changed and Who is Dead, 2013-2020
Ahndraya Parlato, “Untitled”, from the series Who is Changed and Who is Dead, 2013-2020
In her book Who is Changed and Who is Dead, Ahndraya Parlato uses the life-changing events of her mother’s suicide and the birth of her children as the genesis for an expansive project exploring the contradictory and complex conditions of motherhood. This image-text book threads the political and historical with the deeply personal, bringing together narratives from across genres and generations to create a nuanced and compelling body of work. Interwoven with her own writings are still lives, sculptures, photograms made from her mother’s ashes, and reenactments of 19th century “hidden mother” images. Included, amongst these, are Parlato’s photographs of her children, who are shown with both a fidelity to maternal intimacy and a more distanced contemplation. Within this complexity Parlato strives to find clarity around the fundamental questions of parenthood, mortality, and gender. Are her contemporary fears any different than the fears felt by mothers throughout history? Which anxieties are specific to having female children? And how is motherhood itself a construction?
Ahndraya Parlato was born in Kailua, Hawaii. She has a BA in photography from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her forthcoming book, Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, will be released by MACK Books in 2021. Parlato’s first monograph, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2016, and her collaboration with Gregory Halpern, East of the Sun, West of the Moon, was published by Études Books in 2014.