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 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.

'DADDY' is organized by Graham Feyl and Laurel V. McLaughlin in collaboration with Jenn Sova and after/time collective. The exhibition is accompanied by public programs and an eponymous reader featuring writing by Jenn Sova, Graham Feyl and Laurel V. McLaughlin, Jodi Darby, Rami George, Simone Fischer, Terri Griffith, Jose Luis Benavides, published with the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) and designed by Häsler Gómez.