what we inherit was a group exhibition featuring works by Janhavi Khemka, Maddie May, and Thương Hoài Trần at Truman State University Ophelia Parrish Gallery in October of 2023 in Kriksville, MO.

The show was on view from October 17 - December 1.

What We Inherit is an exhibition by Chicago-based artists Janhavi Khemka, Maddie May, and Thương Hoài Trần. Their practices examine the complexities of memory, familial stories, inherited objects, and learned ways of navigating the world around them. Whether painful, lost, or cherished, histories shape our lives and identities. Each artist's works question their understanding of identity through artifacts of everyday ephemera, domestic space, and family photograph archives. The works presented in this exhibition serve as a link to collective memories and the stories they carry through intergenerational histories and differing backgrounds. 

Khemka’s works invite her viewers to locate their inner assumptions and aural subjectivities within the strange and otherness. To navigate the hearing and non-hearing world, she relays her experiences with acoustics through woodcut printmaking and experimental installations composed of animation, sound, performance, and vibration materials. Slipping between imposed identities like, ‘disabled’, ‘marginalized’, and ‘immigrant’, Khemka transcends ineffectual terms, attuning herself instead to the possibility of listening to materials she works within. 

May’s multi-sensory works magnify the emotional residue of Midwest lower-class households as seen through everyday items. Objects take on life, expressing intimacy, domesticity, turmoil, and discomfort. The works exist as characters that exemplify the physiological aftermath of abrasive events within the home through representations and renegotiations of collected furniture and familiar objects. Ideas of childhood and personal memories act as starting points that speak to forced cycles of addiction and fear. May’s works consider what remains in the aftermath of domestic grief and violence.

Hoài Trần’s body of work directly uses family photographs to speak upon the fragments that are created within memory. Acting as a retelling of personal narrative by uncovering and retracing the familial history that has been disrupted through immigration. Hoai Tran focuses heavily on the process, time, and labor of making in order to analyze themes relating to language, displacement, and generational disconnect using laborious processes in textiles and works on paper.