EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LOVED

considers Orange County, California's history of landholdings, subdivisions, conservatism, and underrepresented narratives through the lens of a mixed-race Chicana and a transracial adoptee.

Situated in the double lens of otherness inherent to adoption and multiracial experiences, Everything I’ve Ever Loved responds to the relationship between home, place, and belonging as a multimedia autoethnography. The project examines how location and belonging shape racial imaginaries, encoded through a veiled understanding of self, distinct to transracial adoption, and informed by place-based racism. Everything I’ve Ever Loved utilizes research and archival materials, including photographic negatives from the 20th century, combined with the iconography of the Valencia orange, a symbol for the County's name and an icon of migrant labor in its farmlands, contrasted by image-making from regional locations, parklands, coastlines, and neighborhoods that comment on the preservation of 'natural' land within the southernmost part of the County; these areas of focus are comprised of print and lens-based media and moving images to create soft, often obfuscated points of view, dislocating subjects and highlighting details of plant life and textures from Orange County's landscape.



—
2019-2025 (ongoing)

Research conducted at the University of California, Irvine’s Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive Center, and the Orange County Archives.

Project support provided by the Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency (2023-24), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship (2023) & TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image Artist-in-Residence Program (2021).

_{Everything I've Ever Loved, screen print & Risograph folio, 10.25 in. x 14.5 in. each, 2023-24}

^{For all its beauty and its transgressions, 2021
Archives Reimagined, four-person exhibition, TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, 2021}

 Stratagems (an overture), softcover saddle-stitch, 5-color Risograph book, 36 pages, 10.25 in. x 7.25 in., second edition 75, 2023

Image Descriptions

^{1   Stratagems (Relocations), dye diffusion transfer prints from FP-100c film, 4.25 in. x 3.25 in. each, 2021}

^{2   Stratagems (Tuna), dye diffusion transfer print from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021
3   Stratagems (Relocated), dye diffusion transfer prints from FP-100c film, 4.25 in. x 3.25 in. each, 2021}

^{4   Stratagems (Alta), dye diffusion transfer print from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021}

^{5   Stratagems (Seaview II), dye diffusion transfer print from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021}