Ahndraya Parlato

Irrational images flash through our minds all the time, in dreams and daydreams. Ahndraya Parlato’s work imagines an oscillation between these »internal« and »external« images, revealing the possibilities of different realities. Combining ten years’ worth of images, A Spectacle and Nothing Strange draws on Parlato’s experience being raised by a single mother who was mentally ill. From and early age, Parlato was put in the unique position of having to decide whether her mother’s observations and fears were real or imagined. These photographs allow her to move between various realities, acknowledging the validity of her mother’s world, while also questioning the boundaries of normal, abnormal, sane, and insane.
Parlato (b. in Kailua, Hawaii) is currently a professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. In 2014 she published East of the Sun, West of the Moon, a collaboration with Gregory Halpern. Christian Hawkey has written two full-length poetry collections, four chapbooks, the cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010), and Sonne from Ort (2012, with Uljana Wolf). He lives in Berlin and Brooklyn, and directs the MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute.