After Maxine
“The life of the dead is placed in the memories of the living.” - Cicero
In my studio practice, I tell stories about natural spaces and home through the lens of memory. I combine collected photographs, created images, videos, and objects into vignettes in order to bring forth narratives about generational family relationships in context with landscape. Using both the past and present, real and fabricated, I invoke comparisons between people and nature, life and decay, creation and destruction. I represent both shared and individual dreams and memories. I use the natural world, the domestic home space, and industrial landscapes as stages for incantation to call forth these memories and dreams. On a broad scale, my work asks the viewer to consider how degradation of the land relates to erosion of family and community.
Looking at the landscape, I specifically relate to my great-grandparents, who were both scientists and artists. I use semiotics of both art and science when creating, engaging with the taxonomic and the nostalgic, the systematic and the sentimental. A visual dialogue with wild, unkempt pieces of land versus paved, manicured, or industrial spaces in the urban and suburban landscape intrigues me. This interplay of schism and fusion between natural and unnatural symbolically represents the relationship between other generations and my own; we are both bonded and disconnected. In terms of presentation, I play with the visual language of archiving and natural history museum displays to blur the lines between truth and fiction, between the real and the unknowable. I investigate these symbolic and ideological ambiguities through the creation of a narrative pseudo-history. Through my work, I explore my relationship to a particular environment both logically and emotionally, as my family felt linked more than fifty years ago.
