‘can i give you this flower?’ 2025 Working Project

‘Can I give you this flower?’ is a collection of lost feelings and new hopes. These photographic collages are snips of found photographs that were hidden away in my attic, untouched and left to dust for almost a century. As I unearth these photographs for the first time, I only recognize one familiar face:  Great-Great Aunt Frances, or “Auntie” as my family and I called her.  Auntie lived with me until she was over 100. Throughout my childhood, she told me stories about growing up in Chicago, yet much of her life was hidden, and lost to time and shifting memory.

As I sift through these photographs, I try to imagine who these people were to her. I piece them like puzzles, offering them flowers and a hand to hold, acknowledging that they are remembered and cannot be forgotten.  As I layer these photographs, I hope to find the world these distant relatives lived in—past my Aunt living through the Great Depression, being a politician's wife, or surviving the horrific Al Capone. I urge viewers to sit with these figures in this new world, and hope people can contemplate their connections with their own personal histories.