OPENING - JANUARY 31
2026
The Tips of My Grandmothers Fingers Itch When I Say Her Name
The Tips of My Grandmother’s Finger Itch When I Say Her Name is a collection of new works by Krista Gay that moves through the intimate terrain of family archives, memory, and inherited presence. Drawing from photographs passed down through generations, Gay approaches the archive not as a fixed record but as a living, unstable site—shaped as much by absence and sensation as by what remains visible.
Images from her family’s archive are recontextualized, layered, and translated into new forms that resist straightforward documentation. Faces blur, information partially dissolves, and moments hover between clarity and erasure. Rather than tracing lineage through a linear narrative, the work meditates on how memory persists unevenly—through gesture, repetition, speculation, and longing.
The exhibition’s title suggests an embodied kind of memory: a physical sensation triggered by invocation rather than direct experience. To speak a name is to activate a presence that exists between the living and the absent. Throughout the works, Gay attends to the tension between what can be seen and what must be felt, allowing images to become thresholds where personal memory meets collective inheritance.
Time in this body of work is folded rather than forward-moving, allowing multiple generations to occupy the same visual and emotional space. The repetition of forms points to the quiet persistence of familial patterns, while gaps within the archive register what has been lost to forgetting and silence.
Through acts of re-seeing and re-making, The Tips of My Grandmother’s Finger Itch When I Say Her Name traces a lineage not only of images, but of feeling—revealing how memory survives as fragments and echo across generations.
Artist
Krista Gay
Opening Reception
Saturday, January 31
6:00 - 8:00pm
454 Seneca Ave, Ridgewood, NY