Stage Five: Acceptance
For the past five years, I have been grieving the loss of my mother’s side of the family. They have chosen to remove me from their lives after they failed to protect me from and actively participated in causing me harm and asked me to pretend it did not happen. I only recently became aware I was moving
through the stages of grief in processing this loss. I have come to a place of acceptance, both over the initial harmful events as well as the re-traumatization of being told to pretend nothing was wrong simply for the sake of protecting that white-picket-fence public image.
Process
I no longer have access to family photographs. I am appropriating images of all- American family units and adopting them as my own. Each image depicts a family with a child that resembles me when I was young, but who has been erased.
These images are printed on hand-treated glass. The glass was first cleaned and prepared with a gelatin solution. A liquid emulsion, Liquid Light, was then applied to the surface. Images were appropriated from various sources and printed as negatives. These negatives were used to create contact prints on the prepared glass. The glass was hand-cut to custom fit secondhand frames. The frames are important, as they give the work the look of an eclectic collection of family portraits, such as what might be seen on the wall of a grandparent’s home.