“A lot of feelings surface when I think about my family history. Flipping through a photo album, page after page filled with rich stories told only by an image. It’s powerful. It knocks me down. I feel the weight of my privilege pushing down on my shoulders. They had nothing but each other, and I’ve had everything I have ever wanted. I feel a pressure to succeed when I look back. I never got the chance to meet my grandmother, she passed away before I was born, but from what my mother tells me, she wanted everything I have the opportunity to do now. So as I flipped through the photo album, I felt a sense of pride and responsibility. Pride for the hard work and determination my family exhibited generations before me to put me in the position of privilege that I am today — a position where I not only have the opportunities that my grandmother so desperately longed for, but also the ability and means to take advantage of them. More than that, I have the responsibility to succeed.”
Open Your Eyes/Dreaming of Reality, from an installation at Parsons Paris, Nov. 20-Dec. 10, 2020
"When participating in the technology of Virtual Reality, through mediums such as VR goggles, before interacting with the software, you must create a “safe space” around you so that when you have the goggles on (and ergo lose sight of the space surrounding you), you don’t collide with your surroundings. I wanted to translate this idea of a safe space into my sculpture by marking out a perimeter of 1.5m x 1.5m (average area of a VR space) within which the project itself would reside. The main aspect of this piece comes from the experience of dreams. Whenever I have a dream that feels real, as though it is not a dream but instead a living reality, I find myself trying to open my eyes to see the figures in my dreams more clearly because oftentimes they appear blurry. Therefore, I wanted to immerse the individual(s) experiencing the sculpture into a blurry dream within the VR safe space."
