Private Story
The Perennial Garden (installation)
My childhood home on Bloomfield Street no longer exists. Although it was just an ordinary building with a backyard garden in Hoboken, NJ, it was a sanctuary to me, a place of magic and imagination. With my childhood sanctuary literally raised and replaced, I find myself returning there in my mind, and in my work, searching for what has been lost in adulthood. By excavating remembered stories, dreams, and family photographs, I have found that underneath the layers lies a deep desire for the refuge and freedom of imagination that I thought I would always have.
The Perennial Garden chronicles my process of looking back at the past like a voyeur, cloaked in its golden glow; obsession with preservation; questioning the photographs' role as a crutch for memory, one with limitations that I explore; and finally leaning into creativity within the medium as an outlet to freedom, as the process of making art is my present-day sanctuary.
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