Cristina Ferrigno              Combined Media

My work is a way for me to tackle the personal and philosophical questions of identity. The feeling of “in between–ness,” as a transnational adoptee, manifests in my themes of preservation, memory and heritage. I’m drawn to photographic processes, which serve as a family archive or documentation of personal history. I work with original official documents, family photos and found items to build a library of images and objects, making motifs and a visual lexicon from which I create combined media works and long term interdisciplinary projects.

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I’ve always had a penchant for collecting, a practice that I’ve incorporated into my art-making. In my recent project Walking Archive, I walk with intention through neighborhoods that hold personal significance and I pick things up, collecting as I meander and creating an archive that serves like a memory. I’m attracted to items from the natural world as well as man made things that seem to hold a history. I’m interested in what these objects and places can divulge about identity, as indicators of class, gender, age, race and so on. Maybe they communicate a cultural significance that is beyond my comprehension. I enjoy fabricating micro-narratives for these items and the photographs I find and take-- assigning value and significance to mundane things. There is a prominent feeling of loss that runs through my work, understanding urban spaces, discarded objects and pieces of nature as things that go through cycles similar to that of life and death, I lean into those feelings of nostalgia but also of grief.