The starting point for this new series of works – made while in quarantine – is a familial one, one that deals with a formal connection to the physicality of each of the empty, sun-bleached, pages of a recovered photo album I inherited from my grandmother. The salvaged album held almost no testimony of the life that it was supposed to carry. My process has been to re-imagine and re-build new narratives upon what was left.
Departing from that specific album, I have photographed each of its pages and repurposed the resulting single images as a “canvas” to later intervene them with materials that are traditionally used in family albums: photo-corners, vellum and glassine, as well as recycled album pages, photo-sleeves, gold-leaf, thread, and paint.
For this series, I elicit and question the empty space – the notion of ‘what remains’ – of the physical photo album, while playfully exploring the numerous possibilities of unkempt recollections in which the absent memories become abstractions. As new technologies claim to aid us in preserving our memories, I reflect on the progressive shift of vernacular photography and the disappearance of the family album as we have known it. These works reflect upon how memory is built through the subjective hand of the album-maker, choosing to edit the continuity of our timelines and therefore altering the narrative for subsequent generations.
Shifted Narratives, Ciconia Edition: 100 Iterations…
“In these works, a single photograph is used over and over as a starting point, the space from which an instinctive response to the image serves as a memory-tracing territory…
