Beloved is an installation that uses objects and photographs, facts, and imaginings to excavate lost history. It is a narrative prose project from an ongoing body of work. This story, told by my mother, recounts one brief moment in time, my parent’s first encounter, after four long years. It is the end of the Second World War. My father returns home from the island of Luzon, in the Philippines.

Beloved was exhibited as part of Case Studies, a unique group exhibition curated by Evonne Davis at Gallery Aferro, Newark NJ in which artists have been invited to intervene with re-purposed, salvaged museum display cases. The majority of these cases were donated to Gallery Aferro by the George Washington Mt. Vernon Estate Museum, as well as from the New York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Large, elegant, dark wood displays, previously used for a traveling exhibition of objects from George Washington’s life, as well as plexiglass vitrines and pedestals, will be transformed by artists for a contemporary vision.

This exhibition creates a dialogue between museum culture, gallery experimentation, and the impulses and voices of artists. Whether described as cases, pedestals, vitrines, casework, or cabinets, the objects can evoke portability and itinerancy in art and culture, as well as, oddly enough, ideals of what is imagined to be fixed, unchanging, permanent, or authoritative. Ideas about archiving, exposure, cultural access, historical narrative, Americana, Colonialism, “high” and “low” culture, containment, consumption, salvage and recycling, object reparation, looking and how it changes what is looked at, preservation, platform and power, the exotic, and the uses of the past also might come to mind.

Archival and altered photographs, audio authored micro-story, army blanket, toy artifacts, bullet casings, plexiglass forms, photographic rug, ship chairs, text, vitrine,
Installation 84 x 37 x 22 inches