15 photographs
Inkjet prints
Various dimensions
These photographs connect two places, two people, in two countries within a single work.
But like the selectiveness of memory itself, each picture exists independently of or alongside
the others. In this way each image tells its own story. Multiple, overlapping stories based on
personal memories distanced from each other in either time or place, form patterns, telling
relations among the larger memory fragments or passages from my life. Memories from
home during the time of revolution are reflected in surroundings far away.
My photographs translate emotions into pictures. But how can photographs speak at all
if not at first through silence? By re-imagining moments from my past and placing them
within the present, I filter experiences, memories and reveries through an embodied
process of recollection. This work takes place at the intersection between the real and
the imaginary, between truth and fiction, between the unwritten histories connecting me
to my past, my family and to the broader relations of my community.
"I sometimes dream about my grandmother. Like other involuntary
recurrences from the past that appear unexpectedly in the present,
my dream rekindles and temporally collapses my grandmother’s
final weeks with my feelings for her then and now.
Today, ten years later, I more easily recall and understand the look
in her eyes as she gazed out from behind her bedroom window
watching me leave home for school. Melancholic, a sense of
immanent loss and futility consumed her.
I look over my shoulder and see her face watching me through the
glass pane. This ritual repeats each day, until one morning, her eyes
wide open, her mouth breathless and silent, my grandmother dies.
Her stout presence, so physically commanding in life, the way only
maternal bodies can be, belies this utter stillness. Gently, fearfully
I lower her eyelids and shut her eyes."