American Dreams
2019-2022
American Dreams exists as an effort to come to terms with my experience as an immigrant, figuring out how I fit in within a very white and conservative environment. The images document the places I found in the Nampa, Idaho area after an 8 year hiatus returning to the United States – time in which I went through long immigration processes and family problems – to finally become a US citizen. This project is the conjunction of different works, in different media, that are mixed together in order to question who and how gets to live the American dream.
Based on snapshots of the industrial landscape, photographs of highway signs (in photo transfer on wood) become monuments of the essential American aesthetic. I also include a self-portrait titled brown paper cowboy (printed on an intervened paper bag with hand drawing) that refers to racism and the "paper bag test" that granted privileges only to individuals whose skin tone matched, or was darker, than a brown paper bag.
Furthermore, in the video my own private Idaho I show my profiles to the camera, in a frame that resembles the way in which police photographs are taken, while images of the different places I have lived are superimposed. The sound, in turn, consists of stacked audio layers where I recite a list of factors that influence the way in which my otherness, ethnicity, and migrant situation can be identified; evidencing that identity, our place in society, and the external perceptions of these, are constructions that are modified depending on the contexts and places in which we find ourselves.
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