I'll Carry It For You
A Solo exhibition by Krista Dedrick-Lai
Exhibition Runs: March 1st - March 19th
About the exhibition:
Any parent or caregiver knows all too well the fascination that the mundane can hold for children. A two-block walk can take 45 minutes as your child stops to examine every small “treasure” they find. In a fast-paced and often disturbing world, this opportunity to notice is a gift inviting us to recontextualize trash vs. treasure, beauty vs. decay, and hope vs. hopelessness.
Being a parent, at this unique moment in time, means sending your precious, hopeful child out into a world that often feels like it is balanced on the edge of societal and climate collapse. Our children tell us what they want to be when they grow up and trust us with their scariest fears and most cherished wishes. For those of us who are among the most privileged, our children take for granted that they will always have food to eat, clean water to drink, and a warm bed to sleep in. They trust that, as they grow, they will have safety, resources and opportunities for employment and fulfillment. They trust that people will be kind to them. All children should be able to trust and take these things for granted. And yet so many parents, like myself, see the cracks appearing.
As Meg Conley said in her recent article What Happens to the People Who Survive the End of the World, “I’ve never heard a scholar ask what it was like to be a mother during the collapse of the Bronze Age. But the question won’t leave me. Neither will the questions that follow it. How many mothers saw the cracks in the sky before everything fell down around them? What song did a mother sing as she rocked her baby to sleep while the sea peoples appeared over the horizon? What prayer did she pray in the morning when, despite everything, each day had a beginning? What hope did she whisper to her children before she had to leave them at the end of the world?”
Over the past year my family has developed a practice of collecting “treasures” we find as we go about our daily lives in Philadelphia. Beads, bits of broken metal, mysterious pieces of plastic, and single earrings are all things we have collected. Sometimes a treasure is something that catches my attention. A bit of beauty in one of many piles of trash on a curb or sandwiched between sidewalk cracks. Sometimes a treasure is something I never would have noticed or stopped for, but that my child finds special or interesting for some reason. The rule is, unless it’s extremely dangerous or large, if one of us thinks it’s a treasure: it’s a treasure. We save our treasures in bags and I often incorporate them into weavings or mixed media pieces. Over time this practice has become symbolic of my constant process of metabolizing my hopes and fears for my child’s future. I safeguard his hopes, wishes, interests and self-regard in my heart, mind, and behavior like I hold and carry the rocks and beads he collects in my pockets, handbag or bare hands. I honor his treasures and his heart with my actions and words, symbolic or otherwise. And I hope I am preparing him to be resilient in the face of uncertainty. To be radically joyful even in the darkest of times.
Please sift through these pockets, inspect the treasures within, and redistribute the treasures to other pockets. Children and adults are invited to create their own pocket to take with them out into the world, to hold the treasures they come across.
I’ll Carry It For You by Krista Dedrick-Lai will be on view in Gallery 2 at Da Vinci Art Alliance starting March 1st until March 19th. The opening reception will take place on Saturday March 4th, from 4-7pm.
About the artist:
Krista Dedrick-Lai is a multidisciplinary artist whose work confronts the everyday struggles of motherhood, domesticity, and mental health. Through honest painterly application, the artist reveals, questions and normalizes the taboo brokenness of the every day. With a full range of bright neon marks to dark ominous brushstrokes, Dedrick-Lai negotiates the nonlinear space of healing and acceptance, perpetually carving out spaces of light in the dark, and methodically making a way forward. After earning her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Krista made Philadelphia her home and now lives and works just steps from the Italian Market with her husband and young son. Her work has been shown in numerous Philadelphia spaces, galleries across the country and in virtual spaces such as I Like Your Work, Dear Artists and Stay Home Gallery. Recently Krista completed residencies with Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN and Dear Artists, virtually. In 2021 a poster Krista created in collaboration with Mural Arts and Streets Dept was collected by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“My work is driven by emotion and is rooted in the human experience of existing in a fragile, shattering world. Translucent, anonymous figures navigate the psychological space of my paintings. These figures build, weave and dismantle themselves and their environments. Landscapes that are sometimes threatening and sometimes peaceful tangle with these bodies; enveloping, embracing, or spilling from within them. Personal history and chronic illness inform my work. And the foundation of my identity as a woman and mother are ever present, often peeking out from between the cracks like an underpainting.
The construction of my mixed media works is a mirror of the way the figures in my paintings interact with themselves and their environments: creating, dismantling, and reassembling. “Treasures” trash picked by my family and I as we walk around our urban community are woven into small blankets or tucked into handmade pockets. Buttons, beads and broken bits of metal and plastic become a record of my family’s time experiencing and metabolizing our little corner of the world. As with humans’ complicated existence on earth there is no unchanging ideal that is still attainable. We make the best with what we have. We find the beauty amidst the decay. I weave and sew these bittersweet realities into art pieces; a meditation on radical joy and hope.”