La Piñata y La Locura II, 2024

This inkjet print (Edition of 3 + 2AP) is from my series Mining For Some Sort of Continuity. A study of the fleeting nature of memories, this series focuses on how personal archives construct a mobile, personal, and ephemeral archive that is funda...

This inkjet print (Edition of 3 + 2AP) is from my series Mining For Some Sort of Continuity. A study of the fleeting nature of memories, this series focuses on how personal archives construct a mobile, personal, and ephemeral archive that is fundamental to the construction of diasporic identities. This piece repurposes an archival photograph of my aunt at a childhood birthday party in the early 1970s. The photograph’s emulsion has been lifted from its original paper and transferred onto a broken piece of blue glass – its long exposure has captured the motion of the event while blurring faces long the way, turning the image into a hazy recollection rather than a clear memory. This effect, coupled with the glass’s color and texture, evokes a distant, nostalgic feeling reminiscent of my own memories of birthday parties filled with family, friends and piñatas. The transfer onto broken glass and the intentional distressing of the image both mirror the fragmentation of memory and identity— with the cracks and distortion representing the fractured recollections of childhood experiences. The piece serves as a metaphor for the way memories, much like a piñata, can shatter into pieces – some lost, others enduring, but each fragment carrying a piece of the past.