Fault Systems (2023)
Security envelopes, wrapping paper, poster board, catalog pages, candy wrappers, and embroidery on paper; graphite and tailor's chalk on wall; quilt, books, chisel compass, and rubble fragment on floor.
Fault Systems adapts the visual language of geological stratigraphy—the analysis of sedimentary layers that reveal histories of natural disasters—to map intergenerational trauma and systemic violence throughout my family lineage. The work's structure is adapted from my father's research on the San Andreas Fault, which helped establish paleoseismology as a method for understanding how past earthquakes predict future seismic behavior. Here, that scientific framework becomes a tool for excavating social and political forces that shape individual lives across generations.
The materials themselves carry symbolic weight. Domestic ephemera like security envelopes, wrapping paper, and candy wrappers, suggest the everyday fragments through which family histories are preserved and transmitted. Embroidered catalog pages reference the entanglement of domestic labor and consumer culture, while the collage/assemblage process mirrors the accumulation of sedimentary deposits over time.
Objects on the gallery floor anchor these abstractions in specific lives: a quilt my paternal grandmother made for my father when he was a child; a compass my paternal grandfather crafted and used as a draftsman; books authored by my father and maternal great-grandfather; a piece of rubble from a building my ancestors were forced to leave. These inherited objects become artifacts of personal geology, evidence of creative and intellectual labor passed down through generations marked by displacement and survival.
Wall text mimics scientific diagram labels, but identifies historical strata of injustice rather than geological events. These annotations trace structural violence—from clearances and enclosures in Britain to pogroms in the Russian Empire, from the criminalization of birth control to legal restrictions on married women's autonomy, from racist property covenants to the AIDS crisis. These phrases serve to locate sites of disruption in family systems and in the geopolitical, socioeconomic structures that contain them.
By placing sentimental family objects within this expanded context, Fault Systems proposes that personal wounds–and the responses that they generate–can't be easily separated from the conditions in which they exist.