Pam Korman presents a solo installation Beyond Lip Service, curated by Morgan Hobbs from September 23 - 28, 2026 at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 555 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.

In Beyond Lip Service, mirroring is an intimate act of investigation, an earnest search for the self within the reflection of another. Through photography, installation, and experimental video, Pam Korman examines the role of matrilineage in the construction of the self, tracing subtle influences passed from her mother to herself and then to her daughter. Beyond legal bonds and DNA, gestures, tendencies, and expressions are “inherited” through repeated exposure and imitation, rather than being taught. Within Beyond Lip Service, an adolescent bedroom becomes a looping environment staging these traces of influence and inviting reflection on the fragmented and often obscured process through which a sense of self emerges from matrilineal inheritance. 

In forty tightly cropped photos, the lips of a young woman, a middle-aged woman, and an elder smirk, smooch, and smile. Arranged in a gridded wallpaper, the images wrap the room with patterns of fragmented expressions, partial information to be analyzed, interpreted, and emulated. Three wall-mounted monitors silently present moving portraits of the same three women, titled Screen Tests. Like Warhol’s work of the same name, their heads and shoulders are framed against blank walls, and seated alone under a single light source; they never share physical space within the videos but are connected by a sense of generational continuity. Framed by the edges of the screens, the women occupy a paradoxical position of both exposure and obscurity. The grandmother, mother, and daughter seek to fill a role of ancestral, present, and emerging aspects of the self. The trinity is a living pattern crossing generations. Looking into the camera, they appear simultaneously as observer and observed. The viewer experiences the same dynamic. 

A white bed cradles a screen-up television playing a slow, silent loop of a blinking eye. Reflected within the pupil, a faint human silhouette appears, suggesting the presence of the viewer and the act of looking itself. Dozens of small round mirrors scattered throughout the space capture fragments of lips, eyes, and the bodies of those moving through the room. These reflections multiply and amplify details while withholding the full face. The installation fragments vision, concealing and revealing at once. As viewers move closer to examine the details, they inevitably encounter their own reflections and become part of the visual field. In this moment, the roles of seeker and sought continually shift. Who is looking? Who is being found?

The visual activity of the video, wallpaper, and mirrors contrasts with the blankness of the all-white furniture. The media inputs are powerful and overwhelming, yet the bed, nightstand, and lamp appear to lack a final layer of decoration. Like the inhabitant of the room, the form is present, but the details have not been fully realized.

Having relocated frequently throughout childhood, Korman is deeply interested in how the influence of her family’s matriarchs, along with the domestic environments they shaped, formed the framework of her identity. She often works with familiar household objects such as doilies, thread, foil, mops, and chairs. These ubiquitous items, so common they are often overlooked, carry quiet echoes of generational influence. Through isolation, repetition, and reconfiguration, Korman renders these objects visible again.

In Beyond Lip Service, Pam Korman creates a site of investigation. Faces become paragons of expression. Reflections become tools of examination. Viewers searching the room for meaning encounter themselves within it. For Korman, identity is neither fixed nor solitary. It is a continual process of seeking, formed through the accumulation of gestures, objects, and tendencies passed through matrilineage.