Kate Hargrave: MILK TEETH

In Milk Teeth, the adults are gone. Every vision of childhood you've seen lately — the cottagecore homestead, the golden-hour farmhouse, the pastoral life that someone's definitely monetizing — has one thing in common: it doesn't look like this.

Girls and children drift through caves, farmhouses, and remnants of castles. Soft, luminous, weightless, the girls are barely older than the children and dogs tumbling around them. The children drift through windows, delivered by birds, or fall like putti, as if from the ceiling of a Rococo palace in the time of Marie Antoinette.

The landscapes are dim and stormy, littered with half-buried wagon wheels. The trees are gnarly, broken, and bare. The skies press down — chalky grey, an uneasy blue. At the paintings' lower edges, a few children slip downward into shadowy netherworlds.

Men, when they make an appearance, are spectral caricatures and beside the point: a wandering minstrel, an itinerant priest, a farm boy passing through. The real caregiving here belongs to the girls (mothers?). Like, it always did.

Milk Teeth isn't offering visions of a better childhood. It’s reflecting on one that already exists — hard, tender, and barely holding on. And this makes these paintings feel like evidence, not fantasy.

Kate Hargrave (b. 1981, Boston) lives and works in Portland, Maine. After graduating from RISD in 2003, she spent two decades raising two children on her own while maintaining a studio practice — one that started in her bedroom and expanded as her kids grew. A breakout show at Moss Gallery earned her local recognition. This is her first solo show in New York.