Artist Statement
My painting series “Fragments” is made by mining through photos taken and collected by family members throughout decades of family history. These family photos allow me to reflect on my experiences within a Mexican-American family and see how our traditions have been influenced by rural Wisconsin tradition over time. I cherish these photos andI choose them based on sentiment and personal significance, memory of the time the photo was taken, and the qualities of the photo as an aesthetic object.
Painting becomes a tool to sort through these fragments of memory and navigate emotional conflict as I struggle to remember pieces of my childhood and reflect on the evolving relationships that I have with my family. Throughout my process, I encounter feelings of nostalgia, sentiment, and loss. These feelings are often associated with the people in the paintings, mainly my grandfather Santos. The photos that I choose to paint allow me to remember, celebrate, and honor the family I grew up in.
By preserving these impermanent moments in time through paintings, I emphasize the importance of the memory or the people in the photo.The people who repeatedly show up throughout the series are have been the most influential in my life. Some moments in my paintings took place before I was born, but they are still important events in my family’s history.
As each photo becomes a painting, it changes the memory I associate with the image, as well as the sensory experience of the image. Painting allows me to include expressive elements and enhanced color, which focuses attention on images that may otherwise be overlooked or forgotten. Painting also gives me the ability to highlight the familiar and present it to a viewer in a way that encourages them to remember their own past. It may be that unexpected fields of color recall the photographic processes of film cameras, or that cultural symbols remind the viewer of a different time, or even the arrangement of the paintings in relationship to one another that brings them back to the living room of a family member.
