Who do we choose to remember, and how do we do it? This fraught terrain encompasses family relationships, identities, and collective memorialization. In Forgetting is so long, I collect abandoned family photographs, enlarge them to life-size proportions, then paint over them in an to attempt to reenliven and dislocate the images from their former places and times. By combining paint and photography, I expand Roland Barthes’s theory linking death and the photograph into a loving tribute of remembrance.

The use of bright swathes of color and ornate patterns signifies a kind of vibrant afterlife, where the individual’s vestiges become visitations. Each piece functions as an altar for the departed, a portal that fractures linear time, and an opportunity for rich connection between the viewer and the subject. Floral vegetation, forever blooming in fragmented time, underlines our relationship to the natural world and the hereafter. These rewilded botanical patterns adorn and embellish the photographic relics with devotional marks of care. Nearly forgotten people are transfigured and ‘reborn’ into a fantastical, liminal space that holds both beauty and joy, temporarily suspended from oblivion.