Our Family, CAIRO gallery, September 2009

A group show of drawings, deconstructions and collages tied together by an exploration of photographic materials from the artists own home and family.

ARTISTS:

Paige Fukuhara
Lillian Hern-Fondation
Julia Salamonik

CURATORIAL STATEMENT:

Welcome home to broken bones and silver spoons, to play houses and stitched up wounds.

As we are cleaning, we find them under a bed. They appear and distract us when on a hunt for something else. After an estate sale, they remain unsold, enduring memories of those who have gone before us. They are monumental and symbolic, but they are also banal, blurry and left for discard. As these images become far removed, stories fail us and names escape us, scenarios are imagined and memories constructed, with wishful thinking and tragic deceptions. The connection of past events to present life is impossible to sever, even when our minds can not recall the reasons for their grasp. This connection has prompted us to make our own family, to distill, to memorialize and to alter, in order to understand. And in doing so, these family images become less specific, less referential of yours or mine. They becomes ours.