Join 2016 ICP-Bard student Martha Naranjo Sandoval at the MFA Studios for her solo thesis exhibition, How this has to be told.

As a teenager, I had the shocking realization that many of my dreams and fantasies were not the products of my own imagination but of films I had seen when I was very young. It unleashed a profound skepticism in me about images and their meaning, but it also allowed me to see how powerful they can be. This haunted me when I relocated to New York and sought solace and grounding in my family’s photo albums. Looking often and repeatedly at pictures of my childhood, they suddenly stopped making sense to me.

How this has to be told digs into family photos and mementos to question how much they reveal and how much they silence. Meaning is destabilized as narratives accumulate on the surface of the images across generations and time. Why can't our family recordings just be images? Why do we burden them with so much responsibility of being something else? The pieces in this show are different responses at the intersection of photography, memory, belonging, and the loss of innocence. This is an invitation to the viewer to not stop at first appearances, to dig deeper into images.

Artist Bio

Martha is filmmaker and visual artist from Mexico City. She graduated with honors from Centro de Diseño, Cine y Televisión with a degree in film. Her short films Vacío para Compartir, A Propósito del Dr. Alfonso Sandoval, and Autorretrato con Extraños y Uno Que Otro Conocido were shown in numerous festivals worldwide. She was part of the .357 Estudio y Espacio Creativo photography residency in 2012 and in 2014 she won the Conacyt-FONCA scholarship for foreign studies. She will graduate from the ICP-Bard MFA in Advanced Studies in Photography this year. She works with video, photography, archive, collage, and light sculptures.