My grandpa left to go back home after my brothers first birthday party. I didn’t understand what that meant; back home. Why couldn’t my grandma come to us?
We visited during summer, always expecting to go back to them. But then time passed and my grandma left on a Sunday
Three months after, my grandpa followed her home.
“On Sunday” is a multimedia photo-based project that uses family images, family letters, and other memorabilia to explore the grieving process of the loss of my grandparents. Carmen Gonzalez died in June of 2021 and three months afterwards my grandfather, Panuncio Tiburcio passed away. He died just days after his 74th birthday in September, shortly after Sunday Mass.
In an effort to keep my grandparents alive I am using images to trigger memories from my parents. Stories from my parents' adolescence and my grandparents' life have become the source for places I have revisited and photographed. I used analog film and cameras as a way to connect and perhaps blend with the memories maintained by the pictures of our family albums.
“On Sunday” is a collection of new and old photographs, letters, and memorabilia. Some of these work as documents of past events and experiences while others have been altered to create memories I wished had happened. By adding and removing people and objects using processes such as digital alterations, solvent-based image transfers, and at times crude cutouts, I have created composites mixing reality and fiction to blur the realms of life and death. While these images both depict actual events and some that will never happen, they hope at keeping my grandparents still alive with me as I live without them physically here.
