Precious & Temporary

In the VACNJ Main Gallery, the group exhibition Precious & Temporary looks at family memory as a living material rather than a fixed record. The show includes work by Nick D’Ornellas, Nazli Efe, Colby Lamson-Gordon, Tone Miller, and Andina Marie Osorio. These five artists work across photography, sculpture, video, textiles, and installation, drawing on domestic objects, personal photographs, inherited customs, and multigenerational archives. Their interventions emphasize that preservation is never passive, and to revisit an image, object, or story is also to reshape its meaning.

The exhibition considers family as a network formed across generations, geographies, cultures, and chosen relationships. The works connect personal histories to migration, adoption, cultural inheritance, political circumstances, labor, and collective loss. Together, they suggest that memory derives its value not from permanence, but from the care required to carry something fragile forward.