Flow Space Gallery is excited to showcase new work by Kerry Lessard.

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Lessard is a painter based in Brooklyn but originally from Manchester, New Hampshire. Through a deep and emotional painting practice, Lessard explores the roots of violence in white suburban communities. She focuses on the quiet, often ignored ways that children, especially boys, are taught systems of domination, control, and brutality.

 

Using found Polaroids, personal family photos, and internet archives from the 1950s to the 1980s, Lessard’s paintings draw from the visual language of postwar American suburbia. These familiar images of backyards, schoolyards, and family gatherings are recontextualized. They reveal the cultural myths that normalize aggression and glorify violence while pretending to be innocent, nostalgic, and traditional. Lessard’s work avoids spectacle and embraces tension and restraint. The paintings linger in moments that seem deceptively ordinary. They encourage viewers to confront how violence is learned, rehearsed, and handed down through generations.

 

By placing these stories in suburban settings that are often seen as safe or neutral, the work questions common beliefs about where violence comes from and who is influenced by it.