Collective memory is preserved through story-telling, a ritual integral to family experience, but as time passes, the narratives often bear an increasingly warped and uneasy resemblance to reality.

In my weaving and painting work, I scrutinize this “foreigners-to-Americans” narrative within my own family by using color relationships and the layered materialities made possible by digital Jacquard weaving to create abstract tapestries. The visual interplay this creates within the tapestries conjures anxious temporal echoes and spaces that reckon with troubled memories, beauty, and abjection.

These tapestries spawn from the visual culture of the 20th Century American Midwest — particularly the gaudy visual aesthetics of recently immigrated and assimilated Americans — but are interpolated and remediated by the improvisations of a queer, Jewish hand and color sensibility. The futile attempt to make sense of this haunted heritage raises questions about the American identity, and identity politics, as a modern social hierarchy while a glitchy material sensibility represents a refusal to over sentimentalize or accept an inheritance created on such foundations. In this sense, through weaving these tapestries, I am emotionally processing and criticizing the still unfolding consequences that come with inhabiting this frustratingly overlapping hybrid space within my own body, both beautiful and hypocritical, comforting and hostile.