Natalie Obregon Recabarren

Looks Like You

The ubiquity of family photos and videos allows for a projection of familiarity and the utilization of myth-making. I find the aesthetic commonality and shared conventions among familial archives extremely generative; the codified message of functionality and health is present in most depictions of the family unit despite the reality being varied in this aspect. The attentiveness and time denoted to found images and films imbues the works with a sense of care. The anonymity of the unknown subject and the mediated conditions from which they were sourced places a distance that cannot be crossed. They can never be fully understood or identified; there’s a dissonance between the sentimentality of painting/image transfers and the contextual obscurity integral to the source material. Nonetheless, these terms co-exist within the process and final work. The unfamiliarity of the subjects relocates the exclusivity of sentimentality from personal familial relations to a broader collective.