Senior Capstone: Amalgamated America
The photographs of my childhood are not merely documents of the past — they are material witnesses, now physically and symbolically sacrificed to form an abstract panorama of what I call Amalgamated America. Through a deliberate process of tearing, layering, and reassembly, I transform personal loss into a visual language of shared memory and communal reckoning.
This body of work draws conceptual and emotional resonance from the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi — the art of mending broken pottery with gold, not to conceal damage, but to illuminate it. This technique honors fracture and trauma as part of an object’s history, rather than erasing them. Kintsugi becomes here both metaphor and methodology: a means of repairing the narrative of American identity by acknowledging its historical ruptures — slavery, colonization, displacement, climate violence — and envisioning a new, mended wholeness.
On September 23, 2019, climate activist Greta Thunberg delivered a searing speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, declaring:
“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
Her words capture not only a generational grief but also a deep betrayal embedded in the failed promises of the so-called American Dream — a dream now collapsing under the weight of ecological collapse and political inertia. In this context, the act of sacrificing my own childhood photographs becomes a personal ritual and protest: a form of visual activism in which memory is fragmented and re-formed to engage with intergenerational and ecological trauma from colonialism.
This project is not merely cathartic. It is a call to intersectional and reparative action. Influenced by the frameworks of climate justice, ancestral healing, and community-based restoration, Amalgamated America attempts to mend what was broken—not to restore a myth of unity, but to build a more honest, fractured, and durable collective vision.
By transforming the remnants of personal history into a communal visual experience, I seek to externalize grief, metabolize loss, and materialize hope. This is not nostalgia. It is resistance.
73.75" x 25.5"
