On view: Jan. 18 — Mar. 29, 2025

Opening Reception: Jan. 17, 2025 | 6–9pm

absorption explores the healing power of giving in to a singular experience, particularly within the intimate landscape of family life. Becoming a parent opened a thousand wounds from childhood, but at the same time made me want to be completely healed to be the best possible parent. With this work, I’m inviting the viewer to consider the details of their daily life and the possibility of becoming fully absorbed in them to find healing and self-discovery.

threads is an exercise of mending as practice; piecing together familial relationships across generations. The quilt was made by my great-grandmother, and its fabric has worn thin and torn, losing all of its quilting stitches. I have patched it in my clumsy way and re-quilted it, erasing my grandmother’s work, but also building on it by altering it significantly, and making it work for me and my family. The physical mending parallels my parenting, picking carefully what to carry on from my ancestors and what to leave behind.

The photo series, lethargic, examines the deep single-minded absorption and slowness that I’ve witnessed and experienced in my daily life as a parent. The photos consider the possibility of sinking into a feeling, a texture, rest, and anxiety. When I try to rest or give into lethargy, I find myself in tension with the need to be productive. Exploring what it means to be fully absorbed in one thing offers an opening to rest without reservation.

These two pieces together explore self-healing in a familial context, through witnessing and documenting and physically mending familial artifacts. Photography has helped me explore and cope with the emotional landscape of my healing and parenting.Stitching a familial artifact has served as a physical act of healing. This work illuminates different modalities of experience and constitutes a collaborative healing across generations.

— chelsea silbereis

Opening Reception

Friday, January 17 | 6–9pm

BCA Mills Gallery, 551 Tremont St., Boston, MA 02116

In the main gallery view Waste Scenes: Maia Chao & Fred Schmidt-Arenales, curated by Laurel V. LcLaughlin. In the Project Room explore the work of BCA Studio Resident, chelsea silbereis: absorption. Next door in the BCA Artist Studios Building from 5–8pm, current artists in the BCA Studio Residency program will open their studio doors to the public in a building-wide Open House!

BCA Studio Resident

chelsea silbereis is a photographer exploring themes of family and domestic life, intimacy, and generational trauma living and working near Boston Ma. She works primarily in photographic series and handmade art books. Over the past year she has incorporated hand embroidery into her printed photos. chelsea has had a non-traditional photography education including many internet-based photography workshops, having a photographer parent, and self-directed study of 20th century photographers.

Her photos have appeared in group exhibitions at The Curated Fridge, PhotoPlace Gallery and she is a current Boston Center for the Arts Resident.

chelsea’s commissioned work involves embedding with families to document their real life with an unfiltered and heartfelt lens.

She lives with her husband, 2 kids, a dog and a cat in Belmont Ma and likes to imagine the ghosts of pets past are also members of the household.

BCA Studio Resident since 2022.