Toys and Blocks explores how childhood objects provoke memory and reflect human resilience following the loss of my parents and childhood home. Moving from a decade of documenting healthcare inequities and urban migration, this series turns inward. I utilize photopolymer gravure and chine collé to transform 1970s playthings—such as pick-up sticks, dominoes, and Rubik’s Cubes—into velvety, tactile monuments. These arrangements form a visual language for the moral, social, and political systems inherited from my upbringing—structures that continue to inform our polarized present.

By deconstructing the nostalgia of these objects, I reveal the tension between winning and losing implicit in games, mirroring the broader themes of order and collapse confronted in adulthood. To further this exploration, the series includes actual depictions of geometric blocks that examine tropes of interpersonal conflicts in family relationships that can carry into adult loves and relationships. Through various arrangements of simple black and white squares, these compositions evoke emotional distance, creating a geometric metaphor for how people shift, change, and grow apart.

Contrasting the heavy themes of loss and systemic collapse, the block arrangements utilize trite, cliché titles to introduce an element of comic relief. These titles serve as a poignant reminder of how popular culture constantly attempts to simplify the deeply complicated emotional dynamics found in love, family, and friendship. Ultimately, Toys and Blocks invites a meditation on the gap between private and collective history, questioning how personal experience filters the foundational structures that support our reality.