Familiar Strangers / 2019

The houses I grew up in were littered with family portraits. These portraits were a part of my daily routine for so long that I can describe exactly where they are located in my parents’ homes. Growing up with these faces, I maintained flawless illusions of my relatives, but as I’ve aged and stories were shared with me, the faces in these portraits started to morph into something unrecognizable. Story by story and year by year, the pictures remained the same, but the people in them changed. I realized that the photographs I had been looking at for years did not accurately represent the individuals I saw. In order to process the reality that my family is a group of flawed, multifaceted people, I had to manipulate their portraits to better represent how I see them as individuals. Physically altering each picture allowed me to cope and better understand that the portraits of my family members are much more complicated and layered than the two-dimensional illusions they once were to me.

BFA Studio Art Exhibition