September 18th Visiting Artist Event Talk with MJ Bole from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. in the CCAD Contemporary Art Space

White Elephant (1860 – ) is a meditation on how family histories come to life and retain vitality through photographs and artifacts. It’s an interpretation and retelling of a specific family history that serves as both an examination of how histories are encapsulated and assimilated into our present and a reckoning with the nature of the obsession with family history itself.

In a time of packaged genealogy and promised connection to history’s grandeur and romance, Bole’s work turns the soil on her own family’s past to produce a more visceral interpretation of the arcane nature and collapse of familial histories, artifacts and images. White Elephant (1860 – ) lends itself to a less literal, though deeper, understanding of how lives long ago past are understood now.

Boles work at CCAD is an immersive installation that connects her fascination with the artifacts and photographs of the American Antebellum era – what Greil Marcus described as “…the old, weird America…” – with her immediate experience pertaining to her own lineage; a history steeped in a faded Victorian culture for which Bole is the dedicated and even obsessed archivist.