Marlborough New York is pleased to present Dead Letter Office, an exhibition of work by recent graduates of the 2021 Yale MFA Photography program. The exhibition will be comprised of photography and video works by the graduates.

To present the exhibition, Vinson Cunningham, staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker, explores the work of the graduates below:

Call our world a system of unsteady correspondence: packages proliferate in the hallways, letters turn up shredded by turbulent transit, votes get lost, signals get missed, stuff falls off the truck. Somebody talks through a mask and the message gets muffled. So many of our unrepeatable attempts at talk, at poetry, at song, get shunted into some bland back room, languishing until the recipient comes calling. Sometimes they never do. Art tries to retrieve, but something’s always slipping away.

These works of photography, video, sculpture, and sound are lividly intelligent and incessantly expressive—speaking in tongues that are sometimes satiric, often poetic, always keening to see, and, on some frustrated level, be seen. Come see artists staking out ground in a kind of fertile pur-gatory, the office where communication goes to sigh, and see how their messages make it out.

In Dead Letter Office, ten artists recently graduated from the Yale School of Art’s photography program—Mickey Aloisio, Ronghui Chen, tarah douglas, Jackie Furtado, Max Gavrich, Nabil Harb, Dylan Hausthor, Annie Ling, Alex Nelson, and Rosemary Warren—fisk our society’s missing mail in search of something true. They spent all but a semester of their time at school spirited-away by lockdown, and so, perhaps tellingly, each of their works express a humanism, real but somewhat thwarted, yearning, finally, to touch. Transistor radios, nostalgic travel, tunnels, masks, screens, someone’s plaint about the “thin barrier of water between us”—between all of us.

Several works will be available for purchase. All proceeds will go directly to the artists.