Visual Arts alum Krista Gay '24 recently opened a solo show, The Tips of My Grandmother’s Finger Itch When I Say Her Name, at Sinkhole in Ridgewood, NY.
Founded by fellow alum, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, and Senior Manager of Photography Facilities Dana Buhl '17, Sinkhole is an artist-space dedicated to experimentation in photography and image-based media.
Gay's experimentation approaches her family’s photographic archive as a dynamic, ongoing site of exploration, shaped equally by presence and absence. As expressed by the title, the exhibition depicts memory as the body understands it: fragmented, ephemeral, and often surprising in its manifestations. Gay’s manipulation of images leaves scenes layered and obscured, allowing generations to overlap and faces to blur. Repeated forms echo the persistence of familial patterns while simultaneously drawing attention to the limits of memory; each time a repetition occurs, it is in place of something else forgotten or lost.
Through remaking the archive, Gay doesn't preserve images, but the impressions they leave—a memory, or a resonance. A glitch in the image, or an itch of the fingertips.
The Tips of My Grandmother’s Finger Itch When I Say Her Name is on view at Sinkhole, Ridgewood January 31–March 15, 2026. Gay will be present at the gallery every Saturday from 1–5 PM beginning February 21, and on March 7, she will be joined for an artist talk by Professor of Visual Arts Adama Delphine Fawundu '18.
Krista Gay is a Los Angeles born, New York based artist working through photography, video, text, and sound installation. Her work interrogates images of Blackness as circulated throughout the internet, television, news, and other forms of media. They received their BFA from SVA in Photo/Video and their MFA from Columbia University with a focus in moving image. Past exhibitions of their work include Kunsthall Stavanger, Sadie Coles, Super Dakota, and The Wallach Art Gallery, as well as a collaborative publication in the Brooklyn Rail.
