It was summer some years ago when, across my studio window, I caught a glance of the brown arms of an elderly woman hanging clothes and sheets over her windowsill. I took out my phone and recorded the different fabrics being carried by the wind. It brought to mind images of Abuela in Dominican Republic hanging out sheets to dry in the backyard. I could remember her saying “tiende la ropa que va a llover!” (“hang the clothes before it rains!”), and we would rush to hang clothes on furniture and household objects. Seeing it now in New York City, this mental image seemed to collapse the historical time and geographical distance travelled from the so called third world to the first world. It was dizzying and unsettling. 

Around the same time I started collecting hand-me-down artifacts donated to a second-hand shop around the corner from my studio. Similarly, the image of hand-me-down objects seemed to capture for me a quintessential immigrant ethic of make-do resourcefulness. These and other images come together in my recent work as vehicles to contemplate migration, a longing for home and the objects that trace diasporas across lands.