Through My Mother’s Eyes

“Through My Mother’s Eyes is an installation project created from the archival objects, photographs, and histories of my Mother’s family. While offering a visual, narrative experience highlighting real-life circumstances, the viewer is met with an audible conversation between mother and daughter, discussing life, loss, and the complex nature of memory. This installation succeeds my artist book ‘Abuela: An Album of Memory and Identity Through Photo/Graphics’ as part of a series titled ‘Seeking Roots’. What originated as an investigation into my Mexican heritage as a way to connect to the ancestral roots of my foremothers, the series of works quickly started to form a direction of its own, equally becoming an exploration of the meaning of generational storytelling, how identities and cultures form through stories and the ability for a photograph or heirloom to hold and bequeath memories to its possessor.  

The creative space at the intersection of physical material and digital formats enables me to construct and reconstruct narratives, histories, and mythologies while considering the phenomenon of memory. Digital manipulation reveals how memories mirror through generations like reflection across the water and provides a way to communicate how identities are formed by way of the stories we tell ourselves or are told by others. The photographic medium affords us records that would otherwise be lost to time but the lens itself is unaware of the generational patterns that manifest both in life and in image. My observations expose the generational patterns of a specific middle-class Mexican American family, my own. A family who has lost their connection to their Mexican lands, kin, heritage, and traditions. My objective is to engage with what it means to understand yourself through generational inheritance and what it can mean to lose the privilege of knowing. Although the material is documentary and archival, and the presentation is biographical, I am not unique in my attempt to find my place in and outside of my heritage. The allegorical representation throughout this personal narrative speaks of something greater and more universal than itself.”