WALLPAPER STORIES (2024)

This project explores temporality, ownership, and the familial archive with cyanotype. My great-grandparents, who passed away before I was born, used to own a cabin in the East Portal regionsof the Colorado mountains. After their deaths, the next owners decided to sell the land to the National Parks Service, so it became part of a public hiking trail. I go to see the cabin periodically, and it looks in worse shape every time, sitting in its own rot. After the death of my grandfather in the summer of 2024, I decided to go inside and take something from the house out of desperation to reconcile with this loss. I ended up taking wallpaperfrom the old kitchen. In this piece, I used both the wallpaper as both the surface and the subject. I exposed cyanotype photo prints of my father and my aunt as children, some of which were taken at the cabin. The paper was temperamental, and there was no telling if it would survive the multiple baths. This is the difficulty of maintaining an archive. We were not there for the events these objects originate from. We can only try to piece the history together from the present moment using images and experiences that are not ours, so we will never have the complete story.

This series was featured in Dittmar Gallery x SITE Galleries 30th Anniversary: Archive as Action, Archive as Discourse at Northwestern University.