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2001-ongoing
Memory Works, With All Their Love
jia
Gifts of the Mandarin Tree

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Nassau, Bahamas
Kanazawa, Japan                       𓄰

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2021-ongoing series




Winter 2025-ongoing

2001-ongoing, 2025: layered archival family imagery, wheatpaste on hunter green–primed ¾-inch plywood. Image: Taylor McLaurin (2025)
‘2001-ongoing’ sculptures are made with collage-based compositions using large format, layered archival family imagery fixed by wheatpaste on hunter green–primed ¾-inch plywood. Through this process, I explore questions of memory, fixation, and relationality, how images, situations, and people I am close to exist and live within the world.

At a time when frontline communities are invariably impacted with increased state surveillance, ICE raids, over-policing, and deportation, I ask us to call our attention to spaces within our built environment not to be seen as controlled sites, but also as grounds for our right to opacity, resistance, and collective creation. Through ‘2001-ongoing’, I seek to activate these surfaces as places for visibility, reorientation, and community response. The material and color choices are critical to this context.

Since the 18th century, hunter green has been adored in English estate manuals as a color meant to collapse space and produce an imagined sense of harmony. Its ability to flatten and dematerialize surfaces later reemerged in New York City’s urban landscape, notably formalized during the Bloomberg administration in 2013, when hunter green was used to visually contain the blurred boundary between public governance and private development. Chemically, the alkyd and chromium in the paint resist solvents and present as self-sanitizing, giving the surface a monolithic quality that obscures power, and who has the right to it.

These ‘temporary’ barriers, sometimes left in place for years, disrupt the visual and social landscape to invite public response. I am interested in how civic disruption and protest inhabit these controlled surfaces through posters, tags, stickers, and stamps, or rather markings that create portals of attention and community presence. These gestures form a living archive of resistance through space-making and material intervention.

Image: Taylor McLaurin (2025)