Looking Through

Looking Through is a photographic collage project documenting my process of pausing and returning to redefine home for myself. Each image is a collage piece that dissects a "greater narrative" into smaller details, and speaks to the smaller stories and truths that can be found when I look through the bigger picture - often a messy amalgamation of everyone's narratives and versions of history. 

"Home" has always been an abstract concept for me as a displaced and landless indigenous person born and raised on occupied lands. Through my process of slowing down and reconnecting with my living ancestors, I found that going home wasn't returning to a specific place, but a process of going inward to myself to sift through what beliefs were mine and which were others'; which were based on objective (sometimes hard) truths and which were formed from the act of and need for survival? Using the place(s) that my most recent/living ancestors settled in and my childhood home - Xucyun (Huchiun), Muwekma Ohlone territory - as a subject, my goal was to replicate my internal process with the Land that knew me as a way for me to build a deeper and more honest relationship with it, and in a way that honors Land Ancestor as its own sovereign and sacred being.