Letters from Mama, 2018 - ongoing

Video, Animation and Archival Ink Jet Prints

The ubiquity of the family photo album and its role in creating and negating both personal history and identity is another area of concern in my work.  The first part of an ongoing project, produced as a single-channel video, begins to address how photographs serve as “memory-texts”and how interaction with them produces new narratives.

Letters from Mama reveals the seemingly random details of family life my mother and aunts recall while perusing old photographs taken over a century in the US desert southwest, with primary attention to the parched climate our family negotiated there. I bring the individuals and the spaces they occupied into the present and situate myself into the constructed process of memory itself, examining it in attempt to remember what was not recorded. The mergers of imagery including the desert terrain and the family create a composite impression of my ancestors and their environment as I both imagine and remember it. Performing a sort of forensics, I recreate, rephotograph and interact with old imagery, combining the elements to reconstruct and re-contextualize a setting into which I am inserted.