Gillian Laub is an artist who uses the camera to investigate how society’s biggest questions are often writ large in our most intimate relationships. In Family Matters, Laub’s own family becomes a microcosm of a fractured America when the artist and her parents find themselves on opposing sides of some of the most contentious issues in recent US history. In a compelling blend of images and text, Laub narrates a deep dive into her family’s history and it’s present, confronting issues of privilege, class, and other fissures in the American dream. Ultimately, Family Matters is a celebration of love and family, despite our differences.
Traveling Exhibition
Currently on view at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CA) from October 2022 - April 2023
“The greatest achievement of the show is a clear statement on how the future of American politics is far from homogeneous, and how in 2022 and onward, American families must find a way to live with that.”
— New York Times
Laub’s book is simultaneously a deep, resonating portrait of the trials and tribulations of her own family and a mirror of how all of our lives are complicated roads, pocked with emotional potholes to navigate. As much as we like to think that we are all unique, this is a story just about all of us can relate to.”
— Washington Post
“The collection is most affecting when it reaches the images that were taken more recently, as the edges of Laub’s participant-observer stance were further sharpened by the polarizing political realities of American life.”
— The New Yorker
“The book and exhibition are Laub’s effort to understand not only this rift in her family’s social dynamic but also her relationship to American ideas of privilege, prejudice and values.”
— Wall Street Journal
“Family love is meant to be unconditional—and yet, how many conditions do we in truth impose upon it, or upon the friends we love, insisting on like-mindedness, on the upkeep of strict borders, on lines that cannot be crossed? What are the unwritten codes and expectations that gird our deepest relations? To put it another way, what are the limits of unconditional love? It’s a mark of just how divisive our society has become that it feels radical even to ask these questions. But maybe, Laub suggests, we should be broader-minded than that.”
— Tablet Magazine
“It sparkles and shimmers along the surface, but it also runs deep, replete with landmines and diamonds in equal parts. Family Matters will raise your blood pressure then wrap you in a hug. It’s beautiful, complex and messy, as so many families are.”
— i-D Vice
"Laub’s greatest ability is not only to pare the social distance among her subjects, but to collapse the space between viewer and those within her frame. The photos studiously avoid judgement, no matter how high the stakes. They show people, in all their glorious, savage complexity—and some glint of hope in the transcendence of common experience."
— Cultured Magazine
“Like most families in the 2010s and beyond, we've had to learn compassion and empathy as we struggle with the opposing views of those close to us: whether Trump or Biden, immigration or walls, globalization or "America first", Laub presents the highs and lows of family life.”
— Creative Boom
“In both her pictures and her words, Laub is a natural storyteller. As she traces the poignant, funny, and heartbreaking ways that life has pushed and pulled on her family, she also raises universal, relatable, and lasting questions about love, relationships, and resilience. How do you keep your family together when it’s near a breaking point?”
— Hyperallergic
“The resulting body of work is one of Laub’s most astonishing, and easily her most honest.”
— W Magazine
