Faux Family (2018)

“While helping me load my car for my final year of undergrad, my father mentioned how my older brother, Paul, never saw me off to college. Paul had died unexpectedly two years prior, at 35 years old. I reflected on my father’s comment for a moment, before realizing that I was already more than a year into college at the time of Paul’s death. My brother had always been given the opportunity to be a part of my family; he had, at some point, chosen not to.”

Faux Family is a selection of family photographs from 1983-2017. Like in most of the artist’s family’s photographs—and most of their life—their older brother is absent. In response, the artist has doctored old photographs of their brother Paul into these images, to reconstruct their family as a “complete” unit and point to their brother’s absence prior to, and resulting from, his passing. The artist has also interspersed actual photographs of their brother, which act as moments of unedited memory among the doctored images.

Most of the fabricated images include photographs of Paul as a young child, since the artist’s family’s collection includes very few photos of him as an adult. Consequently, Paul’s depicted age is often incongruous with his actual age at the time the surrounding photograph was taken; though he was the oldest child, he appears in most of these images as equal in age to his siblings, if not younger.