Interminable Day Dream

2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Tyler School of Art and Architecture

Interminable Daydream draws from my relationship with Donora, Pennsylvania, a town that rose and fell with the life and death of the American steel and zinc industries. Made infamous by a deadly smog that killed twenty people in 1948, my family lived and worked in Donora and the surrounding northern Appalachian area for generations. While I did not grow up there, my inherited memories of the region fuel this work. This collection of printed works explores memory through the labor of repeated recollection. Each print is a record of all the prints before it, and a story for the prints that are yet to be made. Like memories, the prints are altered by multiple forces, some corrosive, and degrade over time. Burning through the physical material stills time within the body of each print. While repetition creates the imagery, it is the repeated care of washing slowly degrades it. In other pieces, time is slowed down and sped up through printed and animated sequences. This passage of time is my family heirloom. Understanding Donora means seeing through the suffocating haze of the industrial and bringing it into the tender space of the intimate. The works are not direct narratives. Instead, they are manifestations of the haptic and visceral sensations of family memory, like when looking up at the church where your dad was baptized feels a whole lot like worship, or when remembering feels like caring for an endless pile of laundry. This work is a home that lives only in memory, and maybe never really existed at all.