2018 - 2025

Private Garden Vacant Corner (2018 - 2025) is an exploration of the American landscape. Through prose poetry and documentary photography, an image-text tour of a vernacular landscape becomes a curatorial stage for both personal recollection and collective history. Even the most overlooked corners of a city are saturated with ghosts of the past. Landscape can be a product of trauma, where memory is not a comforting myth but a living, breathing scar. This work confronts the buried history embedded in horizontal space. It exposes a city's seemingly neutral geography as a product of racial violence and exclusionary design. In the work, a private world of individual memory collides with the collective, often erased, history of a large American city. Private Garden Vacant Corner reclaims the dignity of Philadelphia’s workaday landscape. Focusing on details that define a personal vernacular, not the monumental, the work renders mundane space as a canvas where the politics of urban planning and societal segregation have left their indelible marks. Five prose poems work in dialogue with the images, mirroring the process of perception itself. Fragmented verses and concentrated imagery reflect how the mind pieces together a coherent picture from partial sensory data, representing moments of perceptual shattering and reintegration experienced by the artist. Private Garden Vacant Corner is a lyrical reenactment of the cognitive and ecological experience of inhabiting a landscape steeped in conflict and memory, and offers a meditation on how we remember, forget, and ultimately reside within the landscapes we inhabit.