Public Project
Because I Live
Because I Live visualizes these feelings of disconnection, forgetting, and grief by using photography, sanding with sandpaper, incomplete photo transfers, and layering with transparency paper. The family album is an object that one revisits to reminisce on or discover the past, and often these images are used as memory aids. In this work, I erase elements from the photograph by sanding with sandpaper on the printed image and obscure other elements through photo transfer as a way of subverting this idea of a memory aid. The abstracted and obscured photographs become a type of searching for my grandmother, a digging and uncovering of what exists beyond the photograph itself: the Spirit. When one passes, the Spirit does not disappear, it continues everywhere and in everything. There exists still a connection even after death. Death does not erase a person; death simply changes them.
Because I Live is my way of working to understand this idea of a spiritual connection. My work is a longing to be with and of Spirit, what I like to imagine is Love. The photograph is not enough when trying to remember loved ones or an event – the photo is not the person or what happened, it can never be – it is a fragmented past. I share this work to show that lives are knotted together beyond photography and memory. The ones we love never truly leave us and we never truly forget. Even when a photograph of them becomes a foreign object, we are forever connected. Death is not the end.
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