The works in this series were byproducts of an exploration of what might happen if we thought about “forgetting” or “letting go” rather than “remembering” or “holding on” as a way to embody love.

I created these pieces by painting on newsprint with cooking oil, which makes the paper translucent. I added graphite and paper collage elements and placed the resulting “ephemeral paintings” against a backlit window and photographed them. In some cases, I then digitally layered multiple photographs, taken at different times of day, on top of each other. The text in the pieces is Ladino, my grandparents’ first language.

This investigation arose from years of grappling with the dissonance between the anti-authoritarian, pluralistic values I defined myself by as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and the paradoxical way that the culture of Holocaust memorial has been co-opted as an attempt to justify the continuation of genocidal ethnonationalist projects.