This project brought me closer to a family I never had. It started when we had a family garage sale for my stepdad’s great Uncle Beryl. At the garage sale, I found a box with about 1,200 family photos from between the years 1956 through the late 1970’s. I took the slides and started to sort through them. During that process, I noticed there were a lot of photos from the year 1961. I started to form my own story about these people based on how I was seeing the images. That was the basis for this body of work.
The work begins to question what it means for the past to live on. In an imaginary recreated version of the past, I tell a story of a trip to Arizona for a family wedding and reunion. I seek to show how the past and present merge and offer new ways to interpret the past, as well as the ways in which we remember and discuss historical events. It emphasizes the focus on smaller, less significant events we experience that we don’t talk about or remember. I’m focusing on the more “forgotten” or neglected parts of the images and making them the focus of the history I want to remember and preserve. I want this to be my history because I chose to accept these people as family though we’ve never met and have no biological ties.
