a documentation of joy, objectification, and other family heirlooms

About this artwork

Based on a photograph I found in my mother’s old photo album, this painting revisits a moment in time from her bachelorette party in Las Vegas, a scene of dancing bodies and fleeting flashes of light. In reimagining this image, I aimed to explore how memory, femininity, and time all intertwine. The figures overlap and dissolve into one another, suggesting both intimacy and disorientation, joy and objectification. For me, this work is an act of returning to a moment that shaped the women who came before me and acknowledging the echoes of their youth in my own. It serves as a reflection on how images of girlhood are inherited, how celebration and vulnerability coexist, and how we carry the memories we never lived but somehow feel we still remember.