Project Dates: November 2025 – October 2026 At the center of 'Lie and Smile' is a mother-shaped absence—an ache that has defined me since childhood. My mother’s life was marked by addiction, mental illness, and a fierce urge to bury the past. Working with her archive—snapshots, letters, scribbled notes, voicemails—alongside staged photographs and diaristic fragments, I create a visual conversation across time: her life and my reimagining of it. The work navigates grief, rage, compassion, and curiosity, asking what it means to mourn someone who was never fully there. With the Lucie Scholarship, I will complete the project’s final chapter—producing new images, preserving the last of the archive, and transforming years of work into an exhibition and monograph. Funds will directly support production, archival preservation, professional scanning, and large-format printing. Goals: _Produce 12-15 new images integrating archive and staged photographs. _Digitize all remaining archival materials. _Create two print collections for reviews. _Finalize a monograph maquette for publisher submission. _Exhibit the completed work. 'Lie and Smile' is both an intimate reckoning and an offering—a body of work that resists resolution, instead holding space for the contradictions of love, absence, and memory.
