Curated by Maria Sprowls
Filter Photo
Chicago, IL
11.07.2025 - 12.20.2025
Moon and mother, both satellite creatures, exercise a pull toward their respective worlds. A mother’s child can become her whole world, as the force of her gravity touches and affects every single bit of the child.
The gravitational relationship between Moon and Earth parallels the dynamics of the bond between mother and offspring; it is a force that endures throughout the lifetime of both, and reverberates long after one of them is gone. Tides are determined by the Moon’s pull, as its gravity tugs at Earth, shifting its mass and distorting its shape ever so slightly. The pull is strongest on the points closest to the Moon and weakest on the points farthest away, but every single bit of water is affected.
In The Tenderness of Tides, curated by María Sprowls-Cervantes, Alison Chen explores water and its relationship to the moon’s gravitational pull—the magic of invisible forces that dictate the rhythm of the ocean. Such a relationship is perceived and manifested by Chen as both cosmic and intimate, a dance that has existed long before us, and will continue long afterwards.
This body of work began as an organic documentation of Chen's daily experiences in motherhood and greatly expanded when she found a photograph of her maternal grandmother as a new mother holding her newborn daughter. The photograph was rediscovered upon her grandmother’s death at the end of 2019. On that same trip, she heard her mother’s last words to her own mother, who lay cold on the mortician’s table. Knowing the tenuousness of their relationship and gazing upon this celebratory image taken during her traditional Chinese one-month celebration, the artist wondered: “How do we learn what mothering should look like? How does our own generational and cultural trauma factor into our ideas of what it means to care for our children?”
Like the tides, Chen frequently finds herself pulled by forces in her own motherhood journey that are invisible and lay beneath the surface—the residual and inherited trauma of generations past. The artist exists in a constant navigation between her personal beliefs, experiences, and the historical hardships of the past.
