Holly Rios

Artist Statement

"Did the expectations of motherhood strangle you?
Did they weigh your body down and pull you under?
When you saw your own face on my body, was it too much for you?
Was it too much like looking in the mirror every day,
even on the days you couldn’t look in the mirror at all?"

I want to talk about the suicidal mother and her abandoned children. I want to talk about the years spent marinating in estrangement, ascending into adulthood alone. I want to talk about navigating this tense relationship with loss - the paradox of mourning the living. I want to talk about living with unanswered questions. This work is an investigation – forensic, archival, a research project. I’m not a daughter; I am a detective.
My imagery is sourced from personal archives, and relies on the same 19 photographs (all that remains of my childhood with her): repurposed, recontextualized, and recreated. Primarily reproduced in black and white, the photographs have been copied, cut, collaged, drawn on and over, and remade as photo-etchings or screen prints. While the photographic collage techniques play on the stagnation of time, the prints lend focus to the visual relationships between presence, absence, and the tension of negative space. In some of the works, the pieces that make up the image are irreparable – even with the right information, you couldn’t put them back together; they are destroyed. In other pieces, the separated pieces of the image give hope to put the original image back together again. The work is a scrapbook, a jigsaw puzzle. It is a memory and an artifact.