Becky Kolsrud Missing Chunks

In 1862, Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, a novel that probed the widening cultural rift between generations in a Russia on the cusp of upheaval. A new liberal politics, imported from Western Europe, had stripped the aristocracy of its primacy, and more radical ideologies rushed into the vacuum. The novel popularized the word nihilism, the belief in nothing. Its protagonist, Bazarov, embodies it with unflinching conviction: he rejects ethics, God, and any trace of the romanticism that came before him. Yet the thorn in his side is love. It ambushes him, and he cannot reason his way out of it. Turgenev leaves us with a question that Bazarov’s philosophy cannot answer: is love merely an artificial emotion?

Becky Kolsrud’s Missing Chunks poses that question again, in an age of artificial intelligence, shifting ideas of family and identity, and a country undergoing its own identity crisis. However, the love at stake here is not primarily romantic. It is the broader love bound up with family, progeny, and the human drive to create. Pregnant women serve as figurative stand-ins for all of these, a nexus of pluripotentiality both in painting and in a choreographed performance, Prologue, that opens the show. Using this subject matter, Kolsrud expands her previous inquiries into our own inexorable craving for “completion”, the Sisyphean filling and refilling of parts we feel are missing in ourselves.

Gestures are drawn from Childbirth Without Fear, a 1942 manual by British obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read of prenatal strategies that was considered urbane and progressive in its day. Read now, it exposes how thoroughly the female body was treated as a site of instruction and control. Each painting shows one of the rote, rehearsed, and repeated exercises done by pregnant women prescribed by his regimen. A performance at the opening of the exhibition further underscores the artificial nature of these motions through dancers sinuously alternating between each pose, each pregnant. The show, together, has us observe a bodily monumentality reproduced again and again that borders on the fascistic: bodies drilled, regimented, “optimized”, and made to serve as subjects within the broader theory of one man.

What remains is a tension between the natural and the engineered, between love as instinct and love as constructed cultural precept. This rift has perhaps never been more relevant as we increasingly build a new generation of artificial intelligence that we fear may lack any capacity for love, least of all for its creators. The same repetitive exercises and performances of care in our chat exchanges with these bots seek to mimic human camaraderie and empathy and, through this, ask us to consider whether our own versions of these feelings are indeed just as rehearsed, programmatic, and artificial.

At the end of Fathers & Sons, Bazarov dies of a sudden infection. He is buried in a plot of land that, in spite of his own convictions, yields flowers, beautiful, achingly romantic flowers. Even in death, he could not help but produce these children, symbols connoted with love. Yet, these flowers are as much a cultural symbol of love as a cosmic inevitability born out of plant reproduction cycles. If Bazarov could not believe in love yet could not resist it, Missing Chunks asks what becomes of that love when even its most elemental act is rehearsed, managed, and replicated.