Providing us with look at her family and surroundings, Peggy Levison Nolan allows the viewer a glimpse of her life with a beautiful simplicity.
The museum’s information on the artist and her work-
Why must we perpetually reinvent ourselves? Whatever could the next new best thing be? What if repeating the same path over and over, making coffee each morning, looking out the window for birds, feeding the dog and the cat, peering into the bathroom mirror… what if all these reassuring repetitive acts bring us closer to our beating hearts so that every falling strand of hair could be at once old and new?
– Peggy Levison Nolan
Many of us are propelled through life by an urgent need to overcome the limitations and fulfill the expectations we have imagined for ourselves, while missing what is happening before our eyes. Peggy Levison Nolan, on the other hand, is someone who has been paying attention. With a camera and an eye for the telling moment, her photographs are quiet revelations captured from the current of everyday life.
Nolan was 40 when her father gave her a Nikon camera, asking her to take some pictures of his grandchildren. At the time she was a single mother raising seven children and struggling to make ends meet. Without instruction she began to photograph her family and quickly realized she had discovered a way to express her vision of the world. She recounts taking a picture through leaves of a tree in front of her house and suddenly knowing she had found her calling. Eventually she earned a BFA and MFA in photography from Florida International University and became a member of the faculty. In the past few years, she has had a major retrospective at the Frost Art Museum in Miami, several solo exhibitions at the Dina Mitrani Gallery, been exhibited at art fairs and has had two books of her photographs published.
With a few exceptions, the subjects of Nolan’s photographs are her family. From the 1980s and ’90s these were her seven children and their friends. In typical family photographs the subjects pose in a time-out-for-pictures moment. Nolan’s photographs, on the other hand, catch life as it happens, close up, candid, and sometimes awkwardly intrusive. There are plenty of hanging-around-the-house antics but there are also edgier shots including such things as dirty laundry, cigarette smoking, body parts, and young romance that may not make it into the usual family album. There seems to be in these pictures a tacit understanding between artist and subject that a certain objectification must exist for art to be made, even between mother and child. The resulting work, though, feels both familiar and true.
Starting around 2004 Nolan’s photographs began to shift focus to her growing number of grandchildren. With these later pictures she also began to work in color using a pre-digital technology in which a color print (C-print) is made from a color negative. Soft light from windows illuminates the neutral tones of bare flesh, bedsheets, and worn upholstery in these often quiet, meditative works. The rambunctious teenage energy, chaos, and disorder of the earlier works are replaced by pictures of young parents tending to their infants with care and concern. Scattered among a multitude of poetic and insightful pictures are those that show Nolan’s sense of humor is still at play. In these a baby is held triumphantly in the air as she bursts into tears, or a pair of bare feet covered with orange goo inexplicably stand on a chair. In other pictures we see the grandchildren getting older and looking into the camera. Perhaps they are starting to realize they are being watched.