Everything Echoes

On View: December 10 - 13, 2018

The Earl & Virginia Green Art Gallery

Biola University

While growing up, there was a lake that was walking distance from my house. When I was little, my family would go there to spend time together.  As I grew up, it became a place of refuge and solitude in my teenage years. It’s a place that holds memories of transition – a place representing the playful exploration and freedom of childhood while also embracing a tone of contemplation and rest in my later years. Though I have left home, I still see glimpses of the lake in other places I go – the same trees, same leaves, same wildlife. It’s as if home never left me.

Everything Echoes is an exploration of the idea that the memories we attach to places are a part of a larger narrative that speaks to our relation to the present time and space we reside in. Time is vulnerable to transience – it is ever changing. We are always in flux between past, present, and future. Memories exude the temporal nature of our lives by giving us small glimpses of visual and emotional information felt and seen in those fleeting moments. We can never fully embrace the same experience as we once lived. As a moment of the past, the memory itself is reintroduced to the present each time its recalled.

In Everything Echoes I attempt to preserve memories of home through the use of the landscape that surrounds it. Each work correlates to the materials of my home both directly and indirectly. The hanging fabric pieces are made with a photographic process known as cyanotype. This process involves the application of objects onto light sensitive material. The marks left are evidence of the objects’ presence. The floor-based sculpture is a physical representation of the realities of life made from leaves collected at the lake near my parents’ home. The longer the leaves are exposed to air, the more brittle they become. When combined with a projection that recalls past moments of the leaves, it lives in juxtaposition with the aging process of its materiality. Finally, the live streams displayed on monitors within the installation demonstrate our limited view of time. When viewing the present time of another place, we are given a dislocated experience of that place, as we do not have the capability of being at two places at once.  All the works in this exhibition are collectives of moments in time – objects of past and present joined together by the presence of others.