Boundaries
Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
June 8-30, 2018

This project engages history through the reimagining of collective memory, family archives, and the psychic resonances embedded in public and private spaces. Long rooted in textiles, fabrics and thread, my practice currently foregrounds the metaphorical power of these materials to reference the way we talk about narratives and history: we “weave stories” and “connect the threads.” Beyond these specific allusions, my work investigates metaphor as a mode of movement with the potential to collapse distance and difference, revealing the ways that history itself is metaphoric by dislocating the viewer from the certain here of the present to the uncertain elsewhere of the past. This ongoing project began with a reenactment of my ancestors’ journey to Europe in 1844 reconstructed from family archives. The question of re-enactment is central to my project, as there is an intrinsic absence contained within the act. Grasping at that absence and the potential narrative and memory that it contains fascinates me and drives my project. The philosopher George Santayana famously argued, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and through this work I strive to disrupt the violence of repetition by excavating the memory traces and echoes that have been lost between lines in order to shape new narratives of possibility.