If These Shadows Could Talk,
They Would Probably Complain
October 9 - 12, 2025
Show Town, Ice Box Project Space
1400 North American Street, Philadelphia
In If These Shadows Could Talk, They Would Probably Complain, restless hands cycle through repetitive motions. Frozen peas clink into a bowl, surrounded by an absurd display of hand-stitched doilies. In the video Peas, a pair of hands moves steadily: one pea, then another, then another. Each pea is lifted and set down; a hole in the pile opens, the bowl fills. Surrounding this act, the gallery walls are packed with hand-crocheted vintage doilies, each pinned to hover like specimens. Lit from above and below with green stage lights, their shadows multiply, crossing and colliding.
Stitch and clink, each marking time.
What looks like routine slips into liturgy. The gestures of the hands become a ritual act connecting generations through their subtle innate behaviors.
Through her interdisciplinary practice, Pam Korman explores subtle behavioral traits passed through a family’s female generations. By collecting, altering, and (re)organizing everyday domestic objects, Korman highlights the items and the corresponding bodily movements associated with their use. These gestures, so embedded in daily life they nearly disappear, accumulate over time into something tacitly instructive and offer subtle imprints of matrilineal inheritance. A mere routine becomes an intergenerational ritual; mundane objects transform into sacred artifacts. A legacy, both visible and invisible, is quietly passed from one generation to the next.
Informed by the stories and voices of her female ancestors, Korman traces how mannerisms carried in the body pass through matrilineage. Beyond genetics and physiology, gestures, expressions, and tendencies influence future generations through repeated exposure rather than instruction. Together, the video and installation magnify the unseen until routine reveals itself as ritual, inheritance, and identity.
