To Know You (Now and Then)

My parents have felt at home in many houses, but I only know them in one. My mom left Italy in 1980 to start a new life in the U.S. She arrived with two suitcases. She says she came here for love. My dad grew up in Washington D.C. His father, Barney, died before my dad was a year old. With his mom remarried to a military general, my dad lived in eleven cities and five countries before the age of twenty-five. My parents crossed paths in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1992, and they moved to the house where I was raised in 1999. I think about the ways my parents have homes elsewhere, how their lives are bridged by the objects in this space. Over time, I have associated my parents with the house, and the house with a sense of their character.

To Know You (Now and Then) is an ongoing project that confronts aging and empathy as I attempt to understand my parents through my childhood home. Compiling still and moving images, I form an experimental autobiography that blurs the distinction between present and past, staging and authenticity, seeing and knowing. Every time I return home, I have the strange sense that I’m seeing it for the first time. I use the camera to visualize the gaps between who we are at any given moment and what we remember about ourselves and each other.