My practice focuses on the evolution of my relationship with my partner. Using photography as a method of questioning and understanding, I examine how love functions within the complexities of long-distance relationships, shifting spatial identities, and the realities of navigating U.S. immigration through a marriage-based green card. By reframing the concept of the subject from the individual to the couple, I collect the material experiences of a collaborative partnership, using our life as a site of inspiration.
My process is deeply connected to analogue practices. I am interested in how my work, and the way it is made, function in comparison to the systems I am responding to. In “53 Flights”, I used a flight mapping software to generate the path of each flight my partner and I took to and from seeing each other over a four-year period. Using these lines as reference, I drew each line and made contact prints in the darkroom. These segments illustrate a commitment to duration and connection of two beings through one arc of time.
I often work with rubbings and pinhole photography, utilizing these processes to reference the exploitative methods of the government. Yet the imagery these processes produce feels personal and authentic. Unlike the work made with these processes, my series “Questions “exposes images, already existent, further altering them within the demands of the state. This series examines the intimacies of my life and the bureaucratic systems that are attempting to verify it.
In “Questions”, I collected practice questions used in preparation for a marriage-based immigration interview. Sitting with the list I attempted to answer. Struggling to find words, I tried pairing my photographs with question. Wondering, if the photograph could be evidence of a justifiable answer. In doing this a level of absurdity, became evident. What can legally count as love? Using my typewriter, I typed the questions under the photos. The typed questions are documentations of investigation. An index of control imposing a system of structure on my archive of personal imagery. The images carry fragments of personal life; and the questions attempt to verify these experiences.
Between them a gap— of what is felt and what must be proven exists.
