towards horizonatality

a collection of works created between 2017-2020

artist statement:

This body of work tries to understand what it means to not have a familial or cultural history - to look into the past, encounter a blank page, and move forward with the knowledge that your past will always remain silent, undocumented, and lost.

These interests manifest physically as a series of mostly tall structures made of scrap wood, thread, fiber, and staples. My materials are primarily objects for which no one could imagine any further possibility - a void in and of themselves. And the resulting structures and shelters, with their hidden videos and flickering audio, straining antenna-like-metal parts, attempt, in their own way, to transmit through the silence, fill the void with their longing, and be placeholders for my body – telling the world that, I, too, did live. The structures that I create embrace their precarity, their futility, their failure to answer questions or undo wrongdoings. They sit in their honesty, their inability, and yet they never stop straining upwards, their appendages yearning and moving towards some future that even I cannot truly see.

The video and audio embedded within them are not only a way for me to put narrative and accessibility into otherwise often obtuse and formal sculptures, but with these components, the sculptures seem to breath. The flickering images and messages hidden within them revealing, through small gaps and enclosures, a narrative that is never fully revealed, only hinted. The work never done, only started. The sculptures are a balance between revealing and hiding, precarity and resilience.

Although the content of the media tends to be deeply personal (phone conversations with my father that inevitably end in misunderstanding, moments of quiet intimacy between matriarchs in my family, etc), because they are often hidden in a way that makes them impossible to see or decipher in their entirety, I hope to create a sense of longing and incompleteness in the viewer that mirrors my own. And by placing this media into the care of the wooden structures, I make them into guardians of a new kind of archive, one that refuses to fade into silence, and instead is composed of small, tender details that do not allow for the continued disappearance of our humanity.