Skins, 2024, Zilkah Gallery Wesleyan University
For everyone that space is different and for me it was my aunts house. I lived here for some of the first year of my life, have gone to countless family and holiday parties and roamed the grounds building forts and playing in the woods. It was a place where my aunt and uncle constructed a beautiful life for themselves and for the rest of my family to take part in. After the passing of my aunt two years ago, it was where I would go and sit to still feel her presence through the objects that still had her impression.
As with all places, at some point in your life you have to move on from them. Since the passing of my youngest aunt, my uncle could no longer go on living in this house alone. We knew it was time to say goodbye to this life they had created together. To see it boxed up and disassembled was a new form of grief I was never expecting. To add to that my father passed away in october of 2023 shortly before this house was sold. All that was left of him were his clothes in his closet, his laptop and books in the study and his favorite chair that he would always sit in while watching Wheel of Fortune every night.
Once a person moves on, a place and its objects hold their memories. This work is an exploration of the dismantling of a space and a person's objects that once made up their lives. Many of the objects seen in this exhibition were either taken from my aunt’s home or found at Estate Treasures in Middletown, CT. Their whole business model is to help pack up elderly or deceased people’s estates and move them out of their old homes. The whole entire three story building is filled with parts of peoples lives that have been dismantled. This work is an exploration into how the photos and objects that have been left behind only leave small glimpses into what their worlds were like.