Habitat: “the region where a plant or animal naturally grows or lives; native environment; the place where a person or thing is ordinarily found”
Dwelling, place, belonging, home….what do these concepts truly convey? I am a Los Angeles Native, and “home” is an ephemeral term for me. My family homes have ebbed and flowed in fires, demolition and sales to strangers. I am a descendant of the Tongva of Los Angeles, a tribe not federally recognized, often barred from accessing our own ancestral spaces. How do we define where we feel “home” and where does origin play a role in this? The work in this exhibition considers family, place, access and healing. We often experience family tied to the places we gather; given time, we may lose access to those very spaces or people. When access is lost, memory may distort. Sometimes “home” offers wounding rather than healing, and secrets tend to unfold with time. To experience family is to experience hard things, and beautiful things, and in a quest to repair, I’m defining home in new places, in nature and in processing the layers of those who came before me - a sifting of sorts. There is a connection between family, place, access and healing, where at times, loss of access leads to healing and we discover new places of refuge. The soundscape by Samuel Kinsella, that accompanies the show, features birdsong and other sounds recorded on my hikes in Griffith Park, a place I find myself often. I experience solace in the quiet, in birdsong, in the aroma of dewy ground and vegetation early in the morning. Here, the land is allowed to breathe and the sound of my feet on the path lets me know I am alive.
The individuals in this body of work are family, shadows of years past when we would gather, surrounded by nature and each other. Many have passed on, others are distanced, yet their commemoration here is an acknowledgement of personal history and my pursuit of healing. Additional works have grown out of new definitions of home, the spaces where I rest, or observe from the outside. The chain-link fences allude to both physical and metaphorical boundaries, and a tension between past and present, access granted and access denied. In defiance, the plants remain. I consider native plants to be like time travelers, bearers and symbols of hope that life can begin again from seemingly lifeless seeds.
