Ongoing​ Statement

I come from an unapologetically loud, often late, and disorganized family; photography allows me to capture the quiet, in-between moments, granting a viewer access to vulnerabilities that are usually only shared between loved ones. Photographs of overgrown and dying plant life are interspersed throughout portraits. I look at the place my parents reside in, and how they take care of their spaces as a metaphor for how they take care of their family. I have the kind of family that waters the plants but doesn’t trim them, nurturing with a lack of discipline.
 
Throughout Ongoing, I ask questions about my familial relationships. How does my parent’s relationship to each other, and the way that they’ve raised myself and my siblings, contribute to our own construction of identity? How does looking like my mother make me more or less like her? How do my father’s learned ideas of masculinity contradict the way he lives his life? My photographs are embedded in my unique(even from my siblings) critical perspective of my family and the socioeconomic life of a white, heteronormative, fair-weather-Christian, two-working-parents, living-on-credit-card-debit-with-a-second-mortgage family.