Andrea Reyes

My work is based on photographs of my father in his work environment. These photographs are the basis of my practice which consists of photo transferring onto materials and tools owned by my father. My dependency on photography allows me to learn about my father’s life upon his arrival to the United States in 1986 to now.

Collecting and learning about my family’s photographs is the foundation to my practice. These photographs inform the materials they are transferred onto, legitimizing the material with proof of its purpose. This process gives me the opportunity to work with my family history and make sense of how immigration influenced our life from the first-generation perspective. My work is an effort to place a memory into its relative object in order to validate its history and remember it. This dynamic is what draws me to the work of Doris Salcedo who gives form to tough themes such as trauma, pain, and loss that creates space for individual and collective mourning. I want to create a similar space that offers a moment to remember the labor that brought me to where I am.