Shift/Change is a collection of works that visualize the delicate choreography of parenting: navigating nightly shifts of caretaking, the physical transformation of the body, and the cyclical tension between labor and rest.
Oakes and Shulman present precarious sculptures and photographic assemblages to demonstrate how this early care oscillates between discomfort and joy, structure and collapse. Their work gives form to the often invisible and undervalued labor of parenting, revealing a friction between what is seen and what is carried within. As mothers, they navigate an unsteady and ever-evolving terrain, where improvisation becomes both survival and play.
This exhibition also broadens the frame of what parenting means and when it begins. The works suggest that shift and change originate in the pregnant body, a site where transformation takes root through both growth and loss. Even after birth, or in its absence, the body remains a vessel of connection, carrying within it the fetal cells that cross the placenta and endure for a lifetime. In this way, the maternal body becomes a permanent home, an archive of care and a legacy that continues to shift, change, and remember.