In Collaboration With the Dead, artist Nancy Cole engages in a posthumous conversation with her father, Murray Cole, through a series of hand-embroidered photographs. A Royal Canadian Air Force aviator stationed at RCAF Station Grostenquin in northeastern France during the early 1950s, Murray Cole documented his time abroad with a 35mm camera, capturing everyday life during a complex moment in Cold War history. His images depict scenes from post-war France, Morocco, and Algeria shaped by military service and fleeting personal pleasures.

Decades later, Nancy Cole revisits these photographs with needle and thread, printing them on canvas and delicately embroidering their surfaces. Her interventions echo the 19th-century tradition of embellished photographic postcards, where women’s handiwork transformed mass-produced images into valuable keepsakes. Here, the embellishment becomes an act of connection: a way of responding to her father’s gaze, complicating it, and layering it with her own.