Maggie (Emmet and Elijah Gowin at Page Bond Gallery)

I attended the Emmet and Elijah Gowin exhibition at the Page Bond Gallery last week. The series, titled Maggie, was an emotionally connected and retrospective set of works about the Gowin's neighbor, Maggie. The series worked as sort of a biography, except this biography jumped past a large chunk of Maggie's life. This jump was very intriguing to me, though, because it showed where Emmet started his study of this woman and then where his son, Elijah picked up years later. This in itself was the most interesting part of the series, because it wasn't a study of one artist, or of multiple, but disconnected artists. It was a series of photographs from a father and son, which gave the viewer a sense of interconnectedness. It worked so well together not only because of the connectedness of the artists, but also paralleled a connectedness of the artists to the subject. The slight variations in the two artists works represented an interesting variation of their respective relationships with Maggie.
At first glance of the series, I honestly didn't get all of this out of it. I initially saw it as a quirky set of portraits of family members, which a lot of emphasis on Maggie. Then I read the piece by Emmet's wife about the background for this work and I was able to view the piece with a much more interested motive. I really appreciated the relationship the two artists must have had with this woman. They were not actually related, but had such a close tie with Maggie that they may as well had been family. There's something about this development of makeshift family which occurs in society which truly intrigues me. How can someone unrelated to you become such a driving force in your life? Could this person become closer to you than your actual family? If this happens, is that morally right? These questions mean a great deal to me because I have "makeshift cousin" who could practically be my sister, and a real first cousin who I barely see or talk to. This series, Maggie, really helped me put these ideas into perspective.