apparations & disintegrations
2018-2020
To collage is to glue — to make from excavated, collected parts an integrated whole. The process behind this work is disintegration. It is through this process of erasing the visual boundaries between individual bodies, landscapes, and moments in time that the story of the image re-emerges whole, total and full of life. This work examines what it means to emerge from erasure. To combat the violent historical systems that seeks to silence and subjugate Asian women, non-binary folks, trans people. The goal of this work is to reveal energies that are present within the body that remain hidden and buried beneath the surface.
daughter of the smoke (2020)
This series of portraits examines what it means to be born in the site of an interruptured history. To find a sense of meaning self and identity in the drifting smoke of a disappearing act. To emerge from a bloodline written in ash. Unresolved, ever expanding, these (un)portraits, still shimmering in the heat of a forest on fire, assert a somber recognition of things as they are - as they have been - and they present an invitation to participate in the transformative process of Change.
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This work is about reclaiming the body as a site of resistance, as a bearer of intergenerational rage, trauma and strength. It is about asserting my right to be. To exist. I dedicate this work — to all my kin. All those revolting against the ongoing violence of patriarchy, capitalism, colonization and imperialism. Whose act of revolution is the assertion of their right to be in their truth. To embody and live out their highest purpose of healing generational curses who they are despite the loss, the grief, the terror. of it all.
dream speech (2020) invocations, grounding, i and the night
This image series merges self portraiture with abstract images of the local natural environment, the cosmos, and bodies of water. Central to this project are themes of shadow work as a practice of relearning oneself, the subconscious mind-spirit as a portal, and darkness as a living entity from which life emerges. As a kind of movement and expansion from the earlier series "Silence Within Your Skin," the project of "Dream Speech" was created from an ongoing meditation upon generational grief and ancestral relations. In these works, multilayered images of the sky, earth and sea co-create kaleidoscopic shades of darkness - speaking to the shadow as a sacred site of rebirth, transformation and inspiration.
silence within your skin (2019)
Silence Within Your Skin is an examination of the historical invisibilization of womxn in diaspora. Through these multilayered documentations of self, ritual, my relations, and the lands of my ancestors, this series asserts the ways in which the embodied truth and power of these generational histories of resistance, love, loss, being and place are continually expressed through my body and in my daily life. As a ritual of memory keeping, this work is simultaneously an expression of generational grief while also seeking to be in honest relation to the complex and often painful truths that must be faced in order to heal and transform the karmic debts of my lineage,
©2023
by maya faith chan