"The Purpose of Your Trip" exhibit debuts at BMAC showcasing artist Elliott Katz now through March 6
Two long-handled shovels twist together like strands of DNA. Drawer pulls take the form of a barber’s scissors and combs. In the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) exhibition “The Purpose of Your Trip,” artist Elliott Katz of Burlington transforms familiar tools and heirlooms into sculptural reflections on migration, family history, and the ways personal objects carry memory across generations. Katz’s first solo museum show is on view at BMAC through Friday, March 6. Katz’s artistic practice bridges traditional craftsmanship and contemporary technology, drawing on Japanese-American family history to create charged, human-scaled sculptures from everyday materials. The exhibition traces Katz’s family’s journey across North America, from immigration in the 1920s, to incarceration during World War II, to the building of a life in Vermont, while reflecting on the ongoing process of self-invention. Installed in the former ticket office of BMAC’s Union Station building, the exhibition explores themes of transit, borders, and passage. The site-specific installation allows the 1915 building’s windows and shifting light to evoke movement and impermanence. It includes a large-scale reproduction of a 1942 photograph of Katz’s ancestors, taken by renowned photojournalist Dorothea Lange, as part of the effort to document Japanese-American incarceration camps for the War Relocation Authority.
Throughout the exhibition, tools and heirlooms are reimagined as sculptural forms. A replica of the suitcase carried by Katz’s great-grandfather into the Manzanar incarceration camp is rendered in alternating bands of black walnut, sapele, and ash, transforming its original fabric pattern into precious material. Bronze drawer pulls molded from Katz’s grandparents’ barber tools temporarily replace the gallery’s existing hardware, subtly weaving family history into the physical fabric of the space. Other works reflect Katz’s present-day experience of cross-border family life. The title of the exhibition references the question Katz routinely answers while crossing the US–Canada border to visit his partner and son in Montreal. Sculptural replicas of a passport and a soccer ball, repaired using the Japanese technique of kintsugi, highlight themes of separation, connection, and reparation. Together, the works in “The Purpose of Your Trip” weave past and present into a meditation on displacement, resilience, and the quiet conviction required to build a meaningful life. For more information go to brattleboromuseum.org. BMAC is open Wednesdays through Sundays, 10 am to 4 pm. Admission is “pay as you wish.” The museum is wheelchair accessible. For more information and accessibility requests go to the website, call (802) 257-0124 or email office@brattleboromuseum.org.
