The Mother Game brings together photographs, drawings, and paintings made for the experimental, collaborative artist book of the same name (Burrow Press, 2026). The works featured in the book were made in Central Florida and São Paulo, Brazil over the last two years, as Luca Molnar and Kat Shannon collaborated on art and writing over Zoom. Inspired by the games of their girlhood, like scavenger hunts and spot-the-difference puzzles, Molnar and Shannon play with existing and invented game structures to examine notions of maternity.
Molnar uses the history of mothers as plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court as a bridge to look at how contemporary issues of surveillance, censorship, labor, and eugenics are inextricably linked to the political act of parenting. Her decontextualized portraits, based on photographs of mother-plaintiffs with their children, and hyper-contextualized drawings, bounce between the individual and the societal, between slowness and speed, casting history as "a living weapon in your hand" (Diane di Prima). Shannon's work poetically probes the mirrored identities of mother and artist and their ever-contentious relationships to time. Her domestic portraits speak to a self at once enamored with and limited by motherhood. Her photographs' transcendent beauty and stillness recall Richard Wilbur's words: "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World."
To translate these concepts for a gallery audience, the artists have extended the book's playful mechanics into three dimensions, creating new sculptures and interactive works. The Mother Game invites viewers to explore the expansive concept of motherhood at the intersections of the personal, collective, and the political.
