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The Family Dig
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The Family Dig (2008 - 2010)

In the winter of 2007, my grandfather died of terminal cancer. We gathered around the bedside in his final moments. An entire family, spanning three generations, assembled to aid my grandfather, the patriarch, come to terms with his own mortality. His passing evoked the profound realization that my familial heritage was something integral to my identity, but was also something that extended far beyond me.

That moment of physical passage sparked an avid curiosity in me to explore aspects of my lineage that existed outside my consciousness. I turned toward the physical artifacts my grandfather had left behind. With Archeology as a reference, I began to consider these objects as fragments of a larger domestic archive. Each material artifact excavated from the home provided a splintered piece of my familial history. The first, and perhaps, most affecting possession I unearthed was my grandfather's briefcase. It contained cryptic and seemingly fractured objects—a hand-carved wooden pipe, a badge with my grandfather's name on it, marked documents and brochures. I began to see this briefcase as a microcosm of my familial history. Like a detective, I toiled to interpret the clues I found within.

This process of discovery elicited a multitude of emotions. My grandparents bankrupted stock spoke to the regret of an American Dream unrealized; a sheet of studio portraits of my grandfather with a few images removed accented his recent passing; other family photographs distilled moments of happiness and hope. Certain brochures and trade journals addressed the importance of a professional identity, while other artifacts underscored a more private, domestic experience. Other things simply remained mysterious and unknowable. Documents inscribed with enigmatic notes emphasized the fact that history is often fractured and idiosyncratic. I have come to learn that for as many questions as this project has answered, it has raised just as many.

By integrating these objects into environments that are incompatible with their original purpose, I am attempting to collapse time and consolidate my family history into a contemporary framework. This is aided by the inclusion of contemporary family portraits. It is my hope that contrasting these relics with images of my family as they are today, will speak to heritage as a tradition that is fluid and ongoing, as a history that not only exists in the past, but also prevails in present.

Ultimately, these images speak to the joy, melancholy, nostalgia and impermanence that encompass and define most familial heritages. My efforts to preserve my own family’s history can be seen as an attempt to immortalize this ancestry before it slips away like a faded memory.