📒 Making Room

With these photos I documented a performance: moving through an apartment I once had no agency in, handling objects and transforming what had been a hostile, chaotic space.  Each gesture — disruption, reassembly — marked a quiet claim to presence, making room for me. 

I relocated and posed everything, placing and seeing light where there never was light before. Previously untouchable things were recontextualized (and touched) at last. But the rooms are now almost lifeless: there is preservation but also estrangement. 

The series is about authorship, agency, and memory.

A more autobiographical statement follows.

//

In 2010, my mother died. As the last living member of my family, it fell to me to clear out the cluttered 1,200-square-foot rent-controlled apartment where I grew up and my parents had lived for 40 years. The process would take three months. During that time of work and grief, I also had to live there. I documented the process of making room for me at 5E.

After giving away thousands of pounds of belongings, I moved the remaining 4,000 pounds to a San Francisco storage space. Slowly, I made room to bring those objects into my world: a painting, a clock, a lamp. I documented that too.

Apartment 5E was since sold and its walls demolished by a new owner. The objects and these pictures are all that remains.