I’m back in Florida, after spending more than a month away and just completing an intense yet joyous time in residency at Art Omi.* In my many conversations this year, I thought a lot about what it means to nurture connections far away and how to be connected outside of social media, especially Instagram. I'm not there yet, but I would like to form more ways of communication outside of it. If you would like to connect, I would love to hear from you. Let's grab a coffee, in person or virtually.

Last spring in 2025, my mom performed a cleansing ritual that required four incense holders. I tried on my own, using a single orange and centered it in the middle of my space, letting it burn out and leave a lasting mark (it's under a rug now- whoops). 

When my mom arrived, she claimed I did it all wrong. She called her eldest sister for advice.

 

My mom rooted through my vegetable drawer and found my wilting carrots. At each corner of my front room, she created an offering: carrot as an incense holder (the tip pointed at each corner), red and blue gummies, and a circular bao. I tried to make a picture, but my camera failed (the shutter refused to release).**

When I went to Bemis last summer, I became obsessed with that failure to document. I pressed carrot leaves into clay and then glass (technical assist from Matthew Shrader), I made porcelain incense holders from plaster molds of a carrot. I performed a ritual in front of my camera, where a carrot grows hair as the incense and offerings deplete (shoutout to my Bemis intern, MC Daubendiek). 

I tried to immortalize the memory of my mother's carrot offering.

A year later, I returned to it.

Carrot as a root has transformed into my stand in and visual cue for resourcefulness. What do you do when the original object isn’t available? 

 

For the three and half weeks I was at Art Omi, I formed a new ritual. Every day or two or three, I photographed a carrot with its leaves replaced with chrysanthemums sprouting from its root, spinning in the light in the late afternoon. I let it shrink, curve, and decay. 

I thought about time not as linear, but instead, all at once, trapping moments of the past, present and future in my (sometimes moving) images. I’ve continue to reflect in how ‘crip time is time travel’ as Ellen Samuels writes in ‘Six ways of looking at Crip Time,’ a text I return and return again. Not through progress or progression but through moments of acceleration and deacceleration, jerky stopping points and in circular movements. 

Five years ago, I was so certain I was watching my body deteriorate. The reality is that my own body has failed me: my immune system was attacking and targeting my healthy cells as if foreign.*** After insurance battles, and short term miracle drugs taken in the long term, where the side affects feel permanently etched in my brain and body, I am now in a period of stabilization that I worry is unfixed. This feeling of stabilization and destabilization is marked similarly to the way that my GIFs shutter and glitch, trapped by routine medical procedures where I lose and gain time, in a constant loop. 

Yet this summer, I thought about what connection feels in my body and I’ve been making the effort to be more present. There is something about actively listening to rain bouncing off a tin roof, laughter echoing through and from other spaces, thunder from the wildest electrical storm I've ever experienced, and toads that sound like plucking string, that I'm bringing back to the present. Mostly, I'm learning to consciously find more time to look up and to soak in the weather, be it rain or sun.****

 

This year I was awarded the International Fellowship Award from Silver Eye Center for Photography. Thank you to the jurors: Melissa Catanese, Anthony Francis, and Jessica Johnston!

Fellowship 26 group show is closing on August 8th at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh.  I feel incredibly sad I can’t see it one more time. What a thrill it was to see my work come to life and in one place. Special thanks to Helen and Leo for pushing the boundaries of my practice while trusting and understanding my desire to extend my photographs into an immersive experience. They turned the below 2-D psd file into a fully formed reality and supported bringing in the sculptural work I started at Bemis. More installation images found here.

As part of the exhibition programming, Fellowship 26 Conversations: Jamie Ho + Robert Contreras II will be happening online this Thursday, August 6, 6-7:15 pm EST. Join us! I really appreciate the way Rob uses performance to remind us about labor and familial connections. I hope to see you! It's free to attend and register!

I also hope that you spend some time with the guides created for the exhibition: Fellowship 26 Gallery Guide and Fellowship 26 Education Guide. 

Karen Lue wrote a beautiful reflection on To Touch (Peonies) as part of the Education Guide.  Here's a snippet:

"In To Touch (Peonies), the scene evokes a gentleness when a crooked nail caresses a bloom not fully open. But there’s still a crudeness to the hand that touches, garish adornments on top of a skin that isn’t quite right. I think about my body and who has and has not been gentle to it."

In October, I will be at SECAC 2026 conference presenting Altars: Threads of Familial Memory, Resourcefulness, and Migration at "Binding Stories: Cultural Threads Across Borders" session on October 23, 2026 at 1:15-3:00 pm. If you're going or if you're near Winston-Salem, NC, let me know. :)