Paper Airplane (2024) by Marcella Hackbardt

Archival pigment print 

16.5”h x 13.5”w framed

Marcella Hackbardt is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and professor of art and photography at Kenyon College in Ohio. Her artwork has been included in national exhibitions including the WAH Center in Brooklyn, Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Station Independent Projects in New York, and the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, among others.

“In my work, mementos are treasured as reminders of a special person or occasion, but the object’s preciousness and value may be derived in part or primarily—or even exclusively—from the memory, while the object itself may not be intrinsically valuable. I choose objects that are discarded and timeworn, to problematize negotiations of fulfillment and emptiness, pleasure and sadness. Everyday objects have witnessed and encountered personal histories marked by time. The timeworn items, modest inherited materials, and ephemera can be tinged with nostalgia or recollection, and reveal or confound personal and universal perspectives of familial bonds or moments of togetherness.”

These objects also represent the meanings and ambiguities of domesticity, using the symbolism of the objects—house, bird mother and offspring, broken beaks, flowy dresses, a crumpled paper airplane. These attributes were crucial to the desire to collect them and curate home displays, incorporating ideals of womanliness, being a mother, and freedom.

Chipped, broken, shattered, and crumpled, these items connote loss or change, the loss of memory, an emotional turbulence, and personal struggle. Maybe the memories are lost due to aging's slow violence of dementia, or a willful but often unachievable eviction of a recollection that continues to haunt the memory. A previously cherished memory may become a torturous mental burden, a morphology that includes the innocent, intimate, and invasive.

http://www.marcellahackbardt.com/

@marcellahackbardt