Portfolio > On the Count of Three

I am interested in family dynamics, relationships and genealogy, and how they influence identity. A photo album I found of my mother from 1969 during a family trip to Kitzbühel, Austria inspires the Austria Series. This work explores the fantasy we have of our parents before we were born. Each image reads as a snapshot within an ambiguous narrative. A story is hinted at and yet we are not privy to the plotline. The family snapshot reconstructs a family history by recording only those moments that we deem worth remembering.
Photographs themselves age a certain way; particular colors fade and so these paintings become simultaneous portraits of the aged photograph at this specific time, 40 years later. In another 40 years the colors in the photo will be different but the paint will remain the same. The painting acknowledges a dialogue between my mother and me when we are nearly the same age; it comments on the simultaneous collapse in time of 40 years and the distance in time.

Untitled (Austria Series #8)
Untitled (Austria Series #8)
oil on panel
24 x 24 in.
2009