In the summer of 2010, just before beginning at SAIC, my father passed away from cancer. During my time here, I’ve been working through this difficult period; attempting to accept that it happened and trying to understand the total impact it has had on my immediate family. About a year later, my mother moved my family from the Dominican Republic, where my sister and I had spent the vast majority of our lives, to Virginia to be closer to her mother. Though I understood the reasons for the move, it seemed to be another vast upheaval for my family and perhaps one I was not totally ready to deal with.
Recently, I have been photographing the moving process. Documenting and interacting with the furniture I had been so familiar with in unfamiliar places has afforded me the opportunity to carefully witness the construction of our new life as a family. For the most part my mother has done all the moving alone. Both my sister and I are in college and so what came with us and what stayed were decisions made hastily and without help. During the major part of the move, we were unsure where the furniture would end up.
For this semester (or at least until the mid- term?) I want to continue photographing our new home with our old stuff. I would like to continue to explore interactions with the familiar objects and how these pair with new acquisitions. I’m also interested in the still lives my mother sets up to display small trinkets and statuettes- they’re odd and I find they embody the strangeness I feel towards the house and the move.
Questions:
I don’t know how to display the images. Most recently I’ve put them in book form, but I’m interested in displaying them larger on the wall (like in the BFA show maybe?? I don’t know).
http://books.google.com/books/about/On_longing.html?id=DtLTTAYvBFkC
ReplyDeleteseems like your bigger subject is dislocation, the domestic sphere, creating normalcy. your mom's actions are all performances/rituals that you can mine! do it!