EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LOVED

is a multimedia autoethnography that 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.

The project explores autobiographical accounts of place, combined with broader social histories within the geographic region of Southern California, examining how location, place, and belonging shape racial imaginaries. 'Everything I've Ever Loved' maps how a veiled understanding of self, distinct to transracial adoption, and informed by place-based racism, can be contoured by regional politics and geography. The project features photographic negatives from the 20th century, paired with the iconography of the Valencia orange, a symbol for Orange County's name and an emblem of migrant labor in its farmlands; these central images are 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. 

The visual language of print and lens-based media, as well as moving images, depicts soft, often obfuscated points of view, dislocating subjects and highlighting details of plant life and textures from Orange County's landscape—poetic gestures contrasted by text or subtitles presented within and alongside works on paper, photo essays, or video. Interdisciplinary in nature, the project sits between darkroom photography, alternative processes, print media, and analog and digital filmmaking: A still image from Super 8 film transposed as a lumen print; a lusterous silkscreen made with film scans mediated through risograph; creative nonfiction writing used as a score for subtitles, hovering between video art, film essay, and experimental form. 'Everything I've Ever Loved' meanders through the history of photography and media-making, expanding and contracting as a nuanced counter-narrative, slowly articulating how place shapes who we become.


—
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 artist-in-residence programs at Light Work (2025), the Lower East Side Printshop (2023-24), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2023) & TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image (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}