Kehler-Liddel Gallery: Lost/Found

These pieces are part of a triptych centering on my immediate family; the two pieces in this show focus on my mother ("Faith") and on me and my brother ("Who You Gonna Call?").

My mother, who had an eating disorder, is dressed in one of my childhood dance recital leotards and posing provocatively for the camera. I likewise embroidered my brother and I playing dress up. The settings I placed us in represent the spaces and relationships that I lost in the process of coming out as a lesbian.

Each piece is a reliquary of memory; they are small self-contained worlds that protect and enshrine everything that made up my universe. The objects in each are tokens that transport me back to that lost place.

The slowness of hand embroidery is nearly religious in the devotion to the process it requires and to the contemplativeness that process engenders. In that way, these works were made by looking inward, deeply. But the pieces also hide as much as they show.

I didn't realize that the photographs I’d chosen to work from showed each family member in costumes -things that reveal and conceal simultaneously--until after I'd completed them.

Decades after thinking I'd processed everything there was to process about my childhood--the domestic violence, the addiction, the homophobia the hiding and revealing that manifested in these pieces was powerful and informative.