September 2 - 27, 2026

Opening Reception: Friday, September 4, 6-8 pm

Closing Reception: Saturday, September 26, 3-5 pm

“re•cognition”

Larry Volk

“Fall Exhibition”

Bromfield Gallery Artists

“re•cognition”

Larry Volk

The impetus for this body of work came while watching my daughter and her high school friends celebrate her 16th birthday. At the time, I had been working with photographs from my mother's history as a Holocaust survivor in France, and I came upon an image that was deeply familiar to me: a class picture of my mother taken at about the same age.

Suddenly, the class picture assumed a profoundly different meaning. I experienced a kind of emotional palimpsest, in seeing my mother's image through the present-day experience of my daughter gathered with her friends. For the first time, I recognized that many of the girls pictured with my mother—her classmates in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, all about sixteen years old—were likely to have perished during the Holocaust.

Through this present-day reflection, I peeled back another layer of my mother's story. For the first time, I tried to imagine not the survivor she would become, but the ordinary sixteen-year-old girl she had been—with classmates, friendships, and an unknowable future. The school photograph became a catalyst, prompting me to recognize a dimension of her life that had remained outside my own understanding. In that moment, I realized that I had been insulated from my mother's history by my own assumptions as much as by her silence.

My mother lived with an enduring emotional dichotomy: the traumatic history she carried—and largely shielded me from—and the new life she built after immigrating to the United States. *Re•Cognition* arose from the tension between these two realities. It is an attempt to recognize, in both senses of the word, a history that was always present yet only became visible through the experience of observing another generation. The work explores how recollection is continually reconstituted as the present reshapes our understanding of the past. Re-cognition is the moment when an image, though unchanged, yields a different understanding.

Les Souvenirs

In the past decade, much of my work has relied on imagery as a vehicle for narratives of family history, biography, and lineage. When photographs are used as evidence or as catalysts for recollection, their meaning is shaped not only by their materiality, but by the circumstances of their making, and the contexts in which they are encountered. Consequently, photographs are never entirely stable records. However faithfully they may describe what once stood before the camera, their meanings remain contingent, incomplete, and subject to continual revision.

In these prints, which incorporate Kodachrome slides, silver prints and c-prints, I have employed dots appropriated from the Ishihara pseudoisochromatic Plates, a standardized clinical test used to evaluate and individual’s color perception. While the Ishihara plates reveal physiological deficiencies in color vision, these perceptual anomalies provide a useful parallel to the ways memory itself functions. Les Souvenirs explores how photographs participate in the construction of memory, and how recollection is inevitably colored, selective, obscured, and subject to distortion.

Les Souvenirs is, in some respects, a counterpoint to the other bodies of work in the exhibition. The process of making these new pieces was itself prompted by a shift in the context through which I viewed the images, as my own experiences altered my perspective. In this sense, the works in Re•Cognition embody the very questions Les Souvenirs raises.

We often assume that photographs preserve memory by fixing a moment in time. Yet their meanings are never fixed. Images do not simply preserve memory; they acquire new meanings as our lives reshape the questions we bring to them. Re•Cognition is the moment when an unchanged image yields a different understanding.

Mezuzah

 A mezuzah affixed to a doorframe is one of the most visible signs of a Jewish home. For observant Jews, it fulfills a religious commandment, and the klaf—the kosher scroll encased within it—contains the passages from Deuteronomy that prescribe its placement.

My childhood home did not have a mezuzah. Upon reflection, I realize that this decision, conscious or otherwise, was almost certainly informed by my mother’s experiences during the Holocaust. Yet I did not think twice about placing one on my own home, despite the fact that its presence visibly identified us as a Jewish family.

The two objects I have named mezuzot* cannot, by definition, actually be mezuzot. They lack the klaf that gives the object its religious meaning. Instead, I have sought to reinterpret the mezuzah as part of an ongoing effort to understand and define my own Jewish identity.

Contained within these mezuzot are references to my family’s history across Turkey, Cuba, and France, as well as my mother’s experiences during the Holocaust. This inherited history has become a more immediate means of understanding my Jewish identity than religious liturgy. By replacing sacred text with documents and traces of lived experience, the mezuzot become containers for a different kind of Jewish inheritance.

In these two mezuzot, I honor my maternal grandparents and my mother, and the histories they carried forward.

*the plural form of mezuzahNote: for more information about Rosette Volk’s experiences in France during the Holocaust  go to this linked page: https://www.larryvolk.com/about-rosette-volk

“Fall Exhibition”

Bromfield Gallery Artists

Bromfield Gallery artists present artworks in a wide array of media, including porcelain, cyanotype, charcoal on canvas, watercolor and burnt-wood sculpture.

Founded in 1975, Bromfield Gallery is one of Boston's premier artist-run galleries. With an emphasis on New England artists, Bromfield shows contemporary art in all media, including printmaking, sculpture, painting, and drawing, as well as video, installation, and new media.

The gallery is located in Boston's dynamic SOWA district (South of Washington Street) in the South End, home to over a dozen of the city's contemporary art galleries, along with high-end furniture and design retail, and an array of fine restaurants. Nearby is the Boston Center for the Arts, which showcases visual art, cultural conferences, and independent theater companies. SOWA comes alive during each month's First Friday opening receptions when galleries and design stores open their doors in the evening in a festive atmosphere.

Gallery Artists in Exhibition

Laurie Alpert
Mary Bablitch
Jennifer Day
Betsyann Duval
Kathryn Geismar
Donna Gordon
Nancy K. Harrod
Pam Kainz
Linda Klein
Robin Levandov
Cynthia Roberts
Patty Stone
Alexandra Sheldon
Elizabeth Strasser
Julia Talcott
Fleur Thesmar