Chelsey Pettyjohn

Album for Joy brings together paintings and ceramic works by Chelsey Pettyjohn centered around the myth, memory, and visual archive surrounding the final days of the Romanov family. The exhibition grows out of the artist’s long-standing fascination with the story of Anastasia, a narrative suspended between historical fact and fairy tale, where brutality coexists with an impossible glimmer of hope and where myth fills the gaps left by fractured history.

Developed over several years, Album for Joy reflects a body of work that Pettyjohn has long envisioned as a cohesive exhibition. First Year Contemporary provides an intimate setting where the project can unfold as a complete narrative, allowing the relationships between the works to emerge in dialogue with one another.

For more than a decade, Pettyjohn has researched the Romanovs through a vast archive of photographs made by the family themselves. Early adopters of handheld camera technology, the Romanovs became inadvertent documentarians of their own lives, producing images that range from informal vacation snapshots and domestic scenes to photographs taken during their imprisonment. These photographs form the foundation of the series and Pettyjohn has carried many of them with her for years, waiting until she felt ready to translate them into paint.

The exhibition examines the ways historical record and collective imagination intertwine. The Romanov story contains all the elements of a fairy tale: a flawed king, an anxious queen, beautiful daughters in matching dresses, a sickly heir attended by a mystic healer, and a violent end in a Siberian basement. In the century that followed, rumor evolved into legend, most famously through the enduring belief that one princess survived.

Pettyjohn’s work locates a different survivor.

Amid the massacre of 1918, one Romanov did escape; not a daughter, but Joy, the family’s spaniel. The dog fled the violence and was later discovered by a soldier. Blind, grieving, and displaced, Joy spent the remainder of his life in England and was ultimately buried near Windsor Castle beneath a simple inscription: Here Lies Joy.

For Pettyjohn, Joy becomes a counter-myth within the larger Romanov narrative. His improbable survival introduces a fragile thread of tenderness into a story otherwise defined by loss. Throughout the exhibition, he emerges as a symbol of endurance, memory, and the human need to locate hope within tragedy.

Alongside the paintings, a ceramic sculpture of Joy extends the exhibition’s exploration of opulence, fragility, innocence, and violence. Together, these works inhabit the space between history and folklore, asking how stories become myth and why they continue to endure.

Album for Joy considers the narratives we inherit, distort, and preserve. In holding darkness and wonder simultaneously, Pettyjohn reveals how myth becomes a way of understanding the past and perhaps, of surviving it.