domesticity

After the sale of my apartment I moved back in with my parents until the building is complete. I moved back into the room I grew up in, but now I live there with my husband. It's very surreal, but in a way very healing. It is as though we have come full circle but sprialled up looking down at our former selves and our former relationships with each other.

I'm documenting the whole process with photographs and seemingly endless journal entries. As my studio work is all around me, the daily activities of a middle class family in the middle of New York City is a political piece in and of itself. Inside the apartment is familiar, it's the only home I've ever known. But one step "outside" and the surrounding neighborhood is very foreign. We don't look like the neighborhood anymore, now littered with the upwardly mobile and student set.

But to get even a little distance from just being about Me, I'm trying to see this step of the process as part of a larger whole. The fact that, as a product of a middle class upbringing, I'm building a new building on my father's property, and had to move back in for financial reasons, is very very interesting. Taking the time to reflect on family dynamics, geographic constrainsts, and concepts of domesticity (both micro and macro levels) is important to me.

So many photographs look like they'd be great paintings. So many moments galvinized in my memory are at the same time right in front of my eyes. My mother, my father, my husband, my self.