At RAIR Philly, I made work from inside an active recycling facility, surrounded by the accumulated remains of homes that had been cleared after death. The materials arrived at the dump as refuse. I returned them as testimony. A stained glass reliquary assembled from found devotional objects, gold leafed and inscribed with the veve of Baron Samedi. A large scale metal quilt built from salvaged tin, oil drum, and industrial steel in the log cabin pattern, honoring the quilting practice of my maternal grandmother and the pipeline labor of my grandfather. A portrait of my grandmother painted in house paint over a stranger's abandoned canvas, her likeness laid over colors she never chose, on a surface that belonged to someone else entirely. Darkroom prints made from found negatives, the faces of strangers gold leafed into anonymity and consecration, their homes and interiors made visible in their place. Collages built from found stamp and envelope collections and scrapbooking materials, the accumulated domestic paper of other lives used as ground for photographs whose subjects were honored and obscured at the same time. This body of work sits at the intersection of the personal and the anonymous, the sacred and the discarded, and it asks what it means to give ceremony to lives and objects once held dear by strangers. At the dump I watched families empty the apartments of the recently dead. What gets discarded tells you as much about a life as what gets kept. Death equalizes. The materials remain, and they are still asking to be heard.

I treat the archive with the logic of devotion. Libations, offerings, attention. To tend to what has been left is itself a form of knowledge, a practice that has sustained people across generations and across the distances that migration makes. Memory works the same way. It does not require an institution to persist. It requires someone willing to carry it forward and someone else willing to receive it. The work is not about loss. These people prevailed. I am accounting for how they did it.