Nikko Sedgwick is blowing up his family — well, blowing up the scale of his family portraits, that is. In the downstairs gallery of The Re Institute, curated by sculptor Henry Klimowicz in Millerton, N.Y., Sedgwick’s “Family Snapshots” are super-sized, chemically altered, and flattened over a thick base of glitter, coming out looking like they survived a space voyage with David Bowie and saw the other side of Mars. Sedgwick is part of the old Brahmin dynasty that sprung out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and has been the face of every American art form — his sister is film and television actress Kyra Sedgwick, his cousin was Edie Sedgwick, the Youthquake It Girl filmed and photographed by Andy Warhol, and his great-grandmother was Edith Minturn Stokes, painted by famed Edwardian portraitist John Singer Sargent.

Sedgwick, who has relocated with his family from New York City to Litchfield County, Conn., full-time, described the distortion of his family photos as “exhuming something that’s been entombed in the skin of these photographs. Layers of skin, layers of self, layers of generational time. It’s a metaphor for what we obscure…”

His inspiration to use craft glitter as a dominant material sprung from its reflective properties. “The glitter exudes its own light and becomes like working with stained glass. I had been using metallic spray paints, silvers and golds, and then I was going through my basement and found a silver glitter wrapping paper.” That became the eureka moment that changed the trajectory of his large-scale work. “I just love this s—! Although it does infiltrate every corner of my life…”

Sedgwick will further discuss his work at The Re Institute’s artist talk on Saturday, June 17, at 3:30 p.m.

Photo courtesy the artist

Photo courtesy the artist

Photo courtesy the artist