Beginning with the few photos that I have of my grandparents and working with a combination of painting and stenciling, this series is intended to recreate moments and states of mind of my family history that were never captured in photographs.
The title of this body of work refers to a family tree collage made by my wife. The tree ends with my son's birth, and the rest is comprised of photographs of both my family and my wife's family. My son's ancestry is very diverse; my wife's ethnicity is Eastern European Jewish and Costa Rican, mine is primarily African American, and where there wasn't a photograph to be found my wife placed a leaf. Compared to my wife's side of the family, my side seemed like a veritable forest. What is one to make of the absence of images in the construction of identity?
Also in this series are cast iron skillets on which I have drawn portraits of unidentified domestic servants from the 1930's and 40's. The final portion of this work will be a multi-channel video that will playfully depict the ways in which my son is bombarded by images of himself in this age of cameras-everywhere.
I hope that implied in this body of work is the idea that images, while serving as fetish objects for our identity, can also hinder our imaginations from having a more internalized sense of connection to our family roots in ways that are more empathetic and largely unseen.
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