To Have and to Hold Until Death Do Us Part by Emily Kray (8/10/22 - 8/15/22)

Show description provided by the artist.

To Have and to Hold Until Death do us Part is a two volume series of picture books appropriated from the popular Scholastic children’s book series I Spy. This series will mechanically mimic the picture riddles from the source material, but instead will ask readers to find and discover abstract concepts that are associated with the items within each composition. The narrative of the book will be inspired by my research at estate sales and observations of objects that are left behind after the death of an individual. Poignant themes within the book will be the temperance of life, persistence of object oriented identity, and the politics of nostalgia combined with the capitalist gaze. Each volume contains identical objects within each illustration except Volume 1 will contain only cyanotype representations of the items and Volume 2 will contain still lifes rendered in watercolor: one book visually will contain abstractions and ghosts, whereas the other will contain the tangible and believable, respectively. 

I interrogate the formation of memory and question its decay into nostalgia. Collecting and observing these objects that were previously part of another individual’s life story offer a new perspective on the objects that add definition to my own. Having departed, the objects collected for this series are now locked within a liminal space. Their physical form is static, but what they signify has faded and is beginning to morph. 

Artist Bio:

Emily Kray is a visual artist working primarily in watercolor and cyanotype to investigate the complexities and fallacies of memory and the past-tense through manipulating our attachment to nostalgic and familiar forms. She began her artistic career by living and working within Las Vegas, Nevada. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2020. That same year, she began her MFA at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Since then, Kray continues to make art with a focus on community involvement and nostalgic comfort.