Family Times: Judy Gelles – Photographs and Video 1978-2005 is a photographic retrospective of Ms. Gelles’ work, the exhibition highlights her humorous, touching and provocative portraits of her own family as social commentary.

Beginning with her series, “Family Portraits,” the photographs document the daily life of the artist as a young mother alongside her two sons and husband. Gelles uses black & white images and words to describe her innermost thoughts. The show also includes a series of “banal” portraits taken over ten consecutive years of the families’ visits to Florida that traces the growth of the boys and the simultaneous aging of their parents and grandparents. 

Caught in the nexus of feminism, motherhood, finding a career and developing as an artist, Judy Gelles gently but astutely explores these issues in the context of a “normal” middle class, suburban setting.  The most recent piece included is her video “The Age Tapes”, which was filmed at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida last year and tackles the topic of aging with grace and wit.  Always able to see the universal within the specific, Gelles is a great and subtle satirist for our time.