Landscape Studies

Corpus emerged from documentation of a specific site and place of memory. Photographic documentation of my paternal grandmother’s house initially intended to preserve this abandoned site before it succumbed to utter decay, transformed into an investigation on how memory is constructed. Memory becomes activated through gaps between thoughts or recollections.

The spectral state of memory leaves residual debris indicated as a temporal shift between past and present. Wrestling with my memory of how things were at this specific site initiates a fulcrum for thinking of a future never attained or actualized. The house remains stuck in time, but moving forward through decay. Ultimately, it will disappear at some point in the near future.

Images in Corpus are displayed as a construction of memory mapping out or navigating through the house outside and inside. The construction of display echoes an attempt to document a feeling or condition that is almost impossible to capture. Absence is difficult to represent. Documentation functions as evidence of knowledge, but attempting to grasp absence can prove illusory.

As the project evolves, it becomes inextricably linked with my lived experiences growing up in the South Texas Borderlands. The geo-political border between the United States and Mexico is easily demarcated on a map, but living on the border is imbricated and often blurred. Corpus has opened new pathways in my studio practice which consider the history and social complexity of my home.