Marbles in the Valley

Marbles in the Valley, exhibited at the Queens Botanical Garden Fall of 2019. The series of work portrays landscapes reminiscent of the native countries of the city’s diverse communities, depicting the memories of immigrants and the imaginings of a first generation.

This exhibition centers around a series of collagraphs of abstract landscapes printed from the layering of plastic bags. Accompanying the prints are photographs that extend into a different timeline, offering a second perspective of these familiar places. Traveling through remembrance, these visual memories reveal a storytelling of home between immigrants and their children. The fleeting worlds of migrant families are united into a new space, materializing the redefinition of culture in a distant settlement.

Once an industrial dump referred to as the “Valley of Ashes”, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and the Queens Botanical Garden, are today places of communal recreation. The use of plastic bags replicates their histories by becoming a landfill turned landscape. Plastic shifts into the realm of cross generation memories through its imprints. As a mediator between worlds, plastic becomes a vehicle to discuss the pollution of our physical home and a portal to the recognizable yet unknown sights of our memory.

Below, are pinhole photographs taken of the exhibition space using a plastic pint container as a 360 degree camera. Uniting these worlds (represented in the form of prints and photographs) through the lens of an abstract camera makes this space all the more extraordinary. What lies underneath this documentation is yet another layer of an alternate universe.

This project is made possible (in part) by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.