Sites of Formation: Origin Story

Through photography, I return to museum artifacts tied to my Egyptian, Mexican, and Assyrian heritage, using the museum as both archive and site of memory to explore cultural inheritance, belonging, and my own evolving sense of identity.

Drawing from a subconscious, autobiographical well, my photographic practice explores a restless search for identity shaped by my Egyptian, Mexican, and Assyrian heritage. Connected to multiple histories yet never entirely rooted in one, I return to the museum, where material remnants of these cultures are collected, classified, and preserved.

My photographs focus predominantly on ancient Egyptian artifacts, alongside Assyrian and Mexican objects and other imagery encountered within the galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. These institutions were formative spaces in my childhood, shaping my earliest understanding of culture, history, and the material world. Returning to them as an adult, I find myself looking to remnants of distant histories for something that might locate me in the present.

I am interested in the parallel between the museum and memory: both preserve objects and images as evidence of what came before. Guided by an intuitive attraction to particular artifacts, fragments, and displays, I use the camera to trace connections between cultural history and autobiographical memory. Vitrines, reflections, pedestals, and the architecture of display remain visible, emphasizing the institutional systems through which these histories reach us.

The photograph becomes an archive of an archive—a record of something already preserved, classified, and reframed. By returning to the museums that helped shape my understanding of the world, I now use them to search for my own place within it, approaching identity as something continually assembled from what is inherited, remembered, encountered, and imagined.