And then there were two...,

xerox transfer, gesso, graphite, charcoal, paper on wood

I have an impeccable memory.

I am an avid journal keeper, pack-rat, and an initiator of arguments over who said what. In revisiting and analyzing the events that have occurred in my life, I find myself yearning for a narrative in which one thing clearly leads to another and complex situations are cleverly resolved. I am perhaps too attached to the acts of remembering, reminiscing, and longing.

And Then There Were Two… created in 2011, arose from my experiences attempting to access my own family’s memories after their relocation to Nigeria in 2006, and my continued obsession with the stories that would be forever lost once my last living grandparent passed away. Using photocopy transfers as a base, I apply a variety of mediums to omit and blur details from photographs, giving them new meaning and capturing truths not apparent in the originals. Some of the images are pieced together family photographs and others are photographs that were never actually taken, but created retrospectively, using collaged images found on the Internet and my own memory. This collection of work attempts to capture the texture and history of lived experience, particularly my desire to preserve my individual and cultural identity in the absence of my family through the creation of new artifacts: a childhood in a Midwest college town, an emerging understanding of a family in flux and the fleeting concept of home, in hopes of creating an archive for myself of what was.

Now almost 9 years after my creation of this series, And Then There Were Two… has taken on new significance. Two computer hard drives later, many of the photographs I sourced the images from are now lost, and my last living grandparent has been dead for almost five years. The made-up compositions are now my only readily available artifacts from that time, showing that my original mission, to create an archive of what was, was successful.