ARTIST STATEMENT:
In America, there is 1 divorce every 36 seconds. That is 2,400 divorces per day and 876,000 divorces a year. To me that statistic reads, a family is torn apart every 36 seconds. 2,400 homes are broken each day. With statistics like this, how can one imagine that this is not the only reality there is anymore? Statistically, 50% of the time the word “family” today evokes images of what one might call a “broken home.” This is the side of the statistic I grew up in, while the other 50% are images of, what I would imagine, stability and love. These are the images you see throughout advertisements from past decades. Images of the “perfect” family, you know the ones where the parents are smiling lovingly towards each other and the children are laughing along as if they haven’t a care in the world? False Advertising.
This “perfect” family does not exist. However, throughout my childhood it was in these images of the past within which I took comfort. Retreating from my own family life and finding solace in the hope that something of the like could exist for someone else and maybe in my future. My project draws inspiration from these advertisements in an attempt to convey my fixation on this idea of “the perfect family” and the comfort this dream-like world I created for myself brought me – while also acknowledging its inexistence.
Throughout my childhood newspaper was often an outlet through which my family’s “dirty laundry” was aired – printing intimate details of the break up of my parents. By using printmaking in the creation of this project I am repurposing the tool, which once brought pain to my family, to depict the very opposite dream world in which I took comfort throughout my life.