Through experimental video, sculpture, and installation, Pam Korman explores traces of familial influence passing through a matrilineage. After a childhood marked by constant relocation, Korman became fascinated by how a procession of matriarchs shaped the framework of her identity. Everyday items from her many homes became imbued with shared family customs and inclinations while forming her sense of place.

In her first solo exhibition, The Weight of Ghosts, Korman collects, constructs, alters, and (re)organizes common household items to become artifacts of identity. These utilitarian objects exemplify behaviors – learned through repeated exposure and imitation, rather than being taught – that leave subtle imprints on the following generation. In a large installation, functional scaffolding supports a series of pulsing lights that sometimes signal in tandem and at other moments emerge individually. Sculptures and videos feature mundane domestic items, haunted by evidence of touch and charged with unspoken histories. Here, Korman explores “weight” by gesturing toward the physical activities associated with an object as well as the psychological or emotional load it can carry. In one video, detailed cast shadows deceptively multiply the presence of a childhood toy. In another, passing micro-expressions connect three women across moving video portraits. Sitting alone in an empty room, they don’t share physical space, but they are connected by a sense of generational continuity.

Patterns structured around multiples of three feature prominently in Korman’s work and reference the archetypal trinity of Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter or Source, Conduit, and Carrier, and the qualities they transmit. This captures ideas of continuity and transformation through Ancestral, Present, and Emerging aspects of the self. All three become one when, as author Layne Redmond noted, “The grandmother once carried the mother in her womb while she herself was developing the egg that would become the daughter.”

The Weight of Ghosts provides an extensive look at Korman’s current research and interdisciplinary practice. Drawing from personal experiences, stories, and voices of her female ancestors, she finds the threads of connection that run through the past and into the future. Her work represents the aggregated impressions and shared family traits that build the architecture of selfhood and identity. She asks, “In the end, what is left behind and what is carried forward?” as she traces the weight of legacy through generations of women.