Reception: November 18, 2023, 2-5pm
Exhibition Dates: November 4 – 25, 2023
In Northumberland, boxing photographer Pete Doherty reassembles the fragments of a life suddenly altered by illness and loss.
After the death of both his parents–his father from a stroke and, within a year, his mother from breast cancer–he realized an invisible line had been drawn that represented before and after: old life, new life; the known world and the unknown world. The only way for him to make sense of this new existence was by reconstructing the pieces of his life, bringing all the aspects of his community together as a whole.
Doherty has always used a very linear, more traditional approach in sequencing and exhibiting his work. This project is a distinctly different series, almost like chapters or sentences in a book, that together create a comprehensive, poetic, and non-linear form. With this series, he, in some way, continues a conversation with his parents, as he tries to understand how to photograph grief and loss, how to not romanticize, exploit or trivialize it.
In bringing these seemingly disparate (in some cases) images together, he creates an aesthetic that invokes questions, and gestures of realignment (past/present/future), and creates a comprehensive but challenging body of work that depicts being alive in a world where loved ones are suddenly gone.
