Family Portrait at Graduation responds to the museum’s architecture and suggests how family structures shape our identity. Each column abstractly stands for a family member through the colored bands which correspond to her family’s clothes, skin, hair, and height measurements in a graduation photograph. The episodic memories written on each column further identify each member and describe the artist’s relationship with them. Their distinct viewpoints, including the narrator’s resistant attitude to them all, show how strong of an impression others leave on us. Like a row of columns, the family is seen as a system of supports and tensions.”
-Samantha Chang, Ph.D. Candidate UCSB Art History