STRATAGEMS
(ORANGE COUNTY)

Stratagems 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, Stratagems 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. Stratagems 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.



—
2019-2024 (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).

This is a research document, an archive, a preliminary attempt at capturing; a schematic referent washed up on the shore of drought; a love story; a homeland; a schism; a marker; a circular way home. A home that is always elusive.

It is an artifact about place and time and non-belonging. Spaces that are ill-defined and misunderstood. It is about being in-between and unsettled. For nothing quite caresses the earth like the Southern California sun that wraps itself around every aggression, every nerve struck by the discontents of what it means to live and breathe in the land when you are brown. And yet, dislocated from fully knowing your ancestors, lineage, and folklore because you are adopted. Adrift in so many unspoken unknowns.

This is an exploration of what constitutes Orange County, a place surrounded by coastal sage and shrub, neighborhoods scented by eucalyptus, cacti blossoming with tuna, citrus from a childhood home, the California pepper tree, and the one that sheds bark and has star-like leaves. A landscape of looking at the horizon from Tongva and Acjachemen territories. Home of the U-turn, the car wash, lakes made by the Anthropocene. And fires that burn perpetually.


This is an overture for what is to come:

For all its beauty and its transgressions.

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

Image Descriptions

^{1   Stratagems (Badlands), 3-color risograph, 11 in. x 17 in., 2021}

^{2   Stratagems (Badlands), 2-color risograph, 11 in. x 17 in., 2021}

^{3   Stratagems (Mission Viejo), 3-color risograph, 11 in. x 17 in., 2021}

^{4   Stratagems (Seaview), 3-color risograph, 11 in. x 17 in., 2021}

^{5   Stratagems (Relocations), digital images from FP-100c film, 4.25 in. x 8 in., 2021}

^{6   Stratagems (Relocated), digital images from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 9 in., 2021}

^{7   Stratagems (Tuna), digital image from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021}

^{8   Stratagems (Alta), digital image from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021}

^{9   Stratagems (Seaview II), digital image from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021}

^{10  Stratagems (Mission Viejo II), digital image from FP-100c film, 3.25 in. x 4.25 in., 2021}

^{11  Wintering (1987-), digital photographs on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic, 13 in. x 19 in., 2022
12  Above the sky & Below the clouds, digital photographs on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic, 22 in. x 30 in., 2022
13  Suspended (and yet), digital photograph on Habotai, 23 in. x 35 in., 2022
14  Stratagems (an overture), softcover saddle-stitch, 5-color risograph book, 10.25 in. x 7.25 in., edition 50, 2021}