To Sell A Home

In August 2022, I said a final farewell to my grandparents’ home in which they lived for 56 years. Here, they raised my mom and aunt, hosted guests from around the world, entertained friends and neighbors, reunited with family living in other countries, loved their grandchildren, and found much happiness together. As I walked through the skeleton of their sold home - painted stark white to appeal to more buyers, 30 year old blue and white linoleum floors covered with ugly grey laminate, walls empty, and furniture gone - I was struck by a flood of memories, sounds, smells, visions, feelings, tears. I imagined the cabinets filled, the walls decorated, the shelves stocked, the windows dressed one more time. Will the house remember? Will I always remember?

This project began shortly after the Home’s sale in Fall 2022 with a duo of mixed media works. In collages that merge photographs and painting, I explored my own memories of the space that was my grandparents’, while honoring the universal experience of grief and loss that accompany the sale of an impactful home.

The most recent iteration of To Sell A Home was born in Spring 2025 when I revisited the process of collecting photos of my grandparents home to organize in a single digital space with the plan of continuing the collage process. While sorting through physical and digitized photographs of the Home’s many eras, I realized that the evolution of the site may be interesting to experience in the form of a book where viewers could flip through the images as I had and witness the passing of time and erasure of identity.

The book functions as an archive of the place, an album of memories for my family, and a story for those experiencing this place for the first time. To Sell A Home also took the form of an installation, inviting viewers to interact with the book, share space with and handle some of the few objects that I kept from the home after its sale, and/or watch the evolution of the home through a video compilation of the digitized photographs seen in the book. Grappling with grief and gratitude, the marvels and limitations of remembrance, and what defines "home" from "house", I explore human attachments to place, stuff, and the memories made in proximity to it.