highway signs

themes;

identity - “Where are you from?” The answer to this question is often a crucial part of a person’s identity, yet I’ve always had trouble answering it. Having lived so many places, I don’t have adequate shared experiences within any community to claim, without feeling like an imposter, that I belong to that place. For years, I felt fragmented and never fit in. I explore this feeling through long exposure self portraits that produce indistinct images.

detachment of present and memory - While my formative memories are scattered across geographies, I was not able to retain the connection with many of the places I lived as a child. Having never stayed long enough to embed into the community, there was no reason to revisit the places I once called home. As result, there is a strange sense of discontinuity between my current life and the memories I have of those places, almost as if they were completely contrived and detached from reality. I explore this through revisiting these geographic addresses through Google Maps and taking photographs of my computer screen, creating a sense of alienation.

highways and travel by car - Driving is such a quintessentially American mode of transportation, and is the main mode of travel my family used as we undertook yearly cross-country moves during my early childhood. Many of my memories from the period were formed with a backdrop of a car driving down a highway—looking out the window, listening to music, watching my parents fight, laughing and crying. To this day, driving on a highway brings me a strange sense of comfort from familiarity. The view from the backseat is inseparable from my early childhood memories.