- 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 lustrous 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.
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2019-2025 (ongoing
Todo Everything (#6, #5 & #4), gelatin silver lumen prints, 2024
Backyard (B-roll), Super 8, 2021-2025
Everything Ever, digital offset newspaper, 2025
History is Time-Tested, archival inkjet prints & silver gelatin prints, research materials from UCI, 2025
Everything I've Ever Loved, screen print & Risograph folio, 10.25 in. x 14.5 in. each, 2023-24
Stratagems (an overture), Singer-sewn softcover, 5-color Risograph book, 36 pages, 10.25 in. x 7.25 in., third edition 150, 2025
Special Collections include the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Special Collections at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Langson Library at the University of California, Irvine, Artists’ Book Collection at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, the Snell Library at Northeastern University, Fine Arts Library at Harvard University,
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).