Many notable photographs of my father and I were taken in our family home in Philadelphia, the one where my Grandma lives and everyone gathers. This house represents a stable continuity and inspires a feeling of timelessness in my family, as the years become uniform in a concrete setting. After my grandfather's and later my father's death, our family group became smaller, and yet the house remained exactly the same. Because of these changes and consistencies, my Grandma's house has become a place where I deeply feel both the living and absent presence of my Dad. In A Cold Fireplace, I dream of a version of this house, one of broken chronology, where it is impossible to distinguish one year from another and time no longer separates the living from the dead. The show and writing titled A Cold Fireplace is centered around the home's ability to exist outside of a linear timeline by holding disjointed emotions and memories in compressed space. Through pulp painted fragments of personal family photos taken within the rooms of my family home, I call attention to the ways in which these interiors both absorb and diminish tragedy. I identify the home as a setting in which chronological time is both broken and looped. I utilize handmade paper, wooden miniature furniture, and ceramic frames to create a materially-potent memory space of the home, one that is both swirling and unchanging.
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