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New Photo Collage Series - Holding Space
My new photo collage series, "Holding Space," is an allegorical exploration of the difficulty of humans to witness feelings of others, without resorting to minimizing or toxic positivity.
The difficulty of “holding space” for another – their perspective, experiences, and basic human needs for being seen and heard – became apparent to me in 2025-26, after a massive tree destroyed much of my house. A year of physical displacement and incessant administrative tasks were traumatic and destabilizing.
The contemporaneous 24-7 news cycle of race-based violence, kidnappings, imprisonments, and murders mirrored and compounded the devastation I felt in my own life. I have often thought about the lives of immigrants to the US, living in fear, in detention, in publicly-recorded private moments of terror while being abducted. I have intentionally sat in silence with these imaginings, and realized the difficulty of relating to these situations for more than a brief moment.
"I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door," the first in this series, takes its name from "The New Colossus," the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Referencing not only the (now destroyed) promise of America as the land of opportunity and welcome, it depicts a lantern in front of a luxury Manhattan apartment building - the "golden door" every immigrant dreams of opening when they come here.
How can we – or can we – simply listen, witness, and “Hold Space” for other individuals, with all of us in our imperfect humanity?
Seven 3-D Photo Collages
24” x 37” x ¼”
32 hand-cut and –mounted darkroom prints; 7 individual vertical sections with hanging apparatuses on reverse
Architectural detail of 101 East 75th St., Manhattan