In Threes

Three is the smallest number that unveils a discernible pattern, a threshold where randomness gives way to order. It shapes how we perceive and interpret the physical world: spatial dimensions, primary colors, laws of motion. We often trisect our understanding of time (past, present, and future), and mortal existence (birth, life, and death).

In Threes: Photographs by Maude Schuyler Clay, Langdon Clay, and Sophia Clay presents the intertwined visions of a married couple, celebrated Southern photographers Maude and Langdon Clay, and their youngest daughter, Sophia, who is forging her own artistic path at age 30. Anchored in the Mississippi Delta town of Sumner (population: 278), the Clays' collective body of work spans decades, revealing not just a shared craft, but a deeply personal bond. This exhibition, their first as a family, illuminates the legacies we inherit, shape, and transmit.

The curation centers on threes: groupings link their images in sets, blurring stylistic boundaries and exposing patterns of repetition and divergence. Some triptychs carry a narrative arc across frames; others isolate a single visual element. Together, their works—sometimes of the same subject, often of each other—trace a visual dialogue across generations. Maude gravitates toward spontaneous portraits, the world in motion; Langdon seeks stillness in the built environment—facades, cars, structures. Sophia, perhaps unsurprisingly, wryly yet lovingly attends to both. Where their styles diverge, they maintain a mutual need to observe and record life as it presents itself. Evident in this selection of images is the family's shared reverence for the alchemy of late afternoon light, a world awash in vivid color. Also apparent is their keen awareness that any subject illuminated in that world—a building, a found object, a person—is bound and transformed by, and ultimately lost to time.

These works, many exhibited here for the first time, offer a fresh view of the Clays' artistic legacy, where time, family, and place converge.

—Ashley Gates