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What Was That?, 2018

Laser Cut Wood Panels

Dimensions Variable

What Was That? is a set of four wooden panels that shine a light on the artist’s matriarchal family history. For multiple generations, the artist’s family has been, in one way or another, immigrants in the countries that they lived in, exactly like the artist. While the language has changed, blurred and the blood has mixed, the sense of not belonging has persisted.

This piece explores the inheritance of trauma through generations of being othered and deemed lesser than. What Was That? is a study in the three generations of women in the artist's family and how, no matter how far back the trauma might have existed, it is still evident and inherited.  The panels illustrate the constant struggle of going back and forth between the artist's two cultures and the two languages through the generations, and the consequence of that push and pull.

Each wood panel has the associated generational language written in the wrong direction thus becoming in some ways difficult to read or incomprehensible to the reader, the way it sometimes is to the artist. 
 

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