ARTIST STATEMENT

Transition – the space in between. Not fully one thing or another. Specific, yet indistinct. Familiar, yet unknown.

Moving back home after four years away, I felt like a stranger in the streets I grew up in. My childhood home stood boarded up, now belonging to someone else. New storefronts lined the streets, their names unfamiliar to me. Maybe things felt so different because I was different. I remembered the days when all I wanted to do was leave. And now that I was back, I wanted nothing more than to feel at home again.

What started as a response to this idealization of the past quickly turned into an exploration into memory, identity, and longing. What makes us feel safe, why that feeling comes and goes, and how we look for it over and over and over again.

When the future feels scary, and the present feels uneasy, we reach for our memories for some semblance of certainty. But nostalgia isn’t just a love for the past– it’s also a response to fear. Fear of what is to come and fear of what is slipping away right in front of us.

Do we long for the past because it was truly better or because it feels safer than the world we’re in now? Do we miss the past itself or just the illusion of certainty it provides us? Do we imagine it that way because the present moment feels too hard to trust?

Reconciling forces us to ask: how do we face the world and how do we move forward?

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