HOME: THE THRESHOLD OF TWO HOUSES
Mid-Residency Gallery Exhibition
STATEMENT:
I am seated under a tree with two friends of mine, quietly enjoying my lunch while my friends chatter about boys. A fellow student walks up, sits down directly across from me and begins to make conversation. Suddenly, and without warning, she asks us, “How many people do you know come from dysfunctional families?” My friends and I are taken aback as we ask her to clarify her definition of the term. She replies, “You know, like single moms or divorced parents.”
This is not the first time I have faced such a question. During my childhood years I was often asked what it was like to come from a split family, as if my domestic re-organization was something foreign or strange and needed to be explained. But what was there to explain? What could I say other than the simple fact that my parents chose to not be together anymore? Of course there are many complex layers hidden behind the doors and inside the telephone receiver but, when you are seven years old, the basic understanding of Mommy and Daddy are not in love is all you really need.
And yet this was not normal. Society held these images of what a perfectly happy family looked like and my own family was not included. Instead, we were the special ones, the weird ones who gave people the liberty to poke at us and ask, “So what’s it like?”
After many years of aggressive avoidance, I finally decided to face those very words that dared to detain me. Immediately after doing this, however, I stumbled upon the civilization of questions that lay underneath. How can I share this with you? Is it even possible? Will words or images ever convey that which has been my life?
This body of work is my attempt.
Originally conceived as a book project, the photographs of my family have been extended to the gallery setting for my Mid-Residency show at California Institute of the Arts. Tackling the issues present in a divorced family (i.e. travel, entrapment, confusion, emotional frustration, and even the stresses of planning), my work also touches upon the problem of “the norm” and how the socially generated idea of a perfectly happy family is becoming more like a narrow vignette of the bigger picture.
Through my photographs I both reject and accept the term “dysfunctional”; playing with it and tearing it apart – trying with all my might to learn its entire anatomy so that when this monster wakes up from the basement of society, its heavy step rushes not to those it is meant to define but rather, faces its creator and asks, “How is it that I have come to be?”
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This show was made possible with very special thanks to the enduring support and assistance of: The Fairweather Family, Christopher Ruiz, Tiffanie Tran, Christian Lara, Sarah Heysel, Megan Broughton, Christopher Hahn, Javier Rosales, Ana Garcia, Arnulfo Reyes, Jenny Lin, Krisitine Tomaro, Mickey Everett, Alex Woods, and the faculty members at CalArts.
AUDIO:
POSTER & GALLERY INSTALLATION:
