The Last Forever

Family photographs are no longer confined to photo albums and stored in shoeboxes. Instead, personal archives have become sites of public spectacle, easily distributed across geographies and shared through social media, resulting in the personal being accessible to total strangers. Traveling together through endless cosmologies of discarded family memories we are the strangers - as creators and as audiences. Together we become part of a story that unfolds live, before our very eyes.

During the pandemic, artists Kamila Kuc and Scott Stark perused hundreds of discarded 35mm family slides from garage sales, lab castoffs, flea markets, eBay, gifts from friends, as well as their own archives. In a shared Google Doc, the artists played a series of ‘exquisite corpse’ tennis sets, a back and forth exchange of images and captions, allowing mysterious characters and spontaneous plot twists to evolve into a playful narrative. In many of these seemingly mundane images, the artists discovered subtle indicators of interpersonal family dynamics captured by the camera during dinners, parties and travels. Who is standing next to who; who is looking at who; and who is absent all provided clues to the artists’ frisky ruminations on the complexities of human and more-than-human relations as mediated by technology.The artists have woven these latent intimations and subtle indicators into a sprawling narrative - about a spouse that’s gone missing - a story that is fanciful, poignant, occasionally illogical but always entertaining.