Grade: 12
Materials: Mixed Media Photography
Dimensions: 1775 x 2268 px
Description: This work is one of the many that pull from the well of the past. My identity as a first-generation child of immigrants led to my family moving around a lot as we attempted to find a crook in the city to call our own. This apartment specifically, which community members dubbed “the Polish ghetto,” is the apartment I lived in when I was two to seven. When I reference my own memories to recall the place, I picture sledding in the old parking lot, listening to the train roar in the distance, and walking through the neighborhood to the Dominick’s in the plaza; it was a grand and vast place. But when revisiting this apartament more recently, it became another cookie-cutter complex, only special because I knew its secrets (that the coin laundry jams or that the radiator is crooked from me standing on it to look out the window). I wanted to explore a contrast in this piece: the plainness of reality versus the vibrant color of nostalgia.
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