DIANA CHEREN NYGREN
The Persistence of Family

This series interrogates the role of family relationships and history in shaping our sense of ourselves and our place in the world. I have composited my old family photographs, photographs I took of my children as they grew, and images of the landscapes in which they and I grew up. With these compositions, generations reach for each other across time. I exist in the tension of the space between those who came before me and those who will come after. The project is driven by a longing for connection that makes real those things I hold dear, and by an anxiety around individual responsibility in passing on family history.
This work raises questions about genetics in determining identity and connecting people, the continuity of historical narratives, and suggests that each of us contains both the past and the future. The project is a portrait of a family, a portrait of the artist through those that have formed her, and an investigation of an individual as part of a continuum.

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