Taking shape around the notion of what my twenty-first birthday means in relation to my mixed-status family’s legal standing in the United States, my practice continues to expand into commemorating, examining, and investigating the experiences related to this milestone, along with what awaits on the other side. Its overall vision is to create objects that quantify the emotional and visceral aspects of immigrant life, as they intersect with time, politics, aspirations, and each other.

My current work occupies itself with understanding how the construction and maintenance of a domestic space can be used to detangle inherited and shared memory. This collaborative construction between myself and my mother, a performance in its own right, has resulted in a tiled, usable floor. This floor, detachable from a grounding foundation, is to be painted in the likeness of a linoleum floor which now only exists in shared, conflicting memories. This floor will be used to visualize different time periods as reflected through nostalgia and loss. Perhaps most important to my work is the research and gathering process of source material, through intimate interviews and in depth understandings of materiality and its roots in life and in art as a whole.

I believe that to speak to larger themes of family, mobility, and time, I must hone in on specific, highly personal moments. Only then will I be able to find something truthful that can be shared with others, as a reflection of their own experiences, intertwined with my own story.