Key Biscayne (featuring portraits from unsolicited mail)
I grew up in Key Biscayne, a sleepy island suburb off of Downtown Miami that caught the eye of my immigrant parents in the late 1980s. Apartments were affordable back then, before Hurricane Andrew razed the island in 1992, ushering a new wave of gentrification that would turn Key Biscayne from a secluded snow bird getaway to a glitzy zip code for an international bourgeoisie hellbent on inflating a real estate bubble. My family's story in Key Biscayne is the story of expropriation over the course of 20 years through last-minute foreclosure auction saves, failed mortgages, shark loans, and HAMP schemes. It's a common story that collectively created the alarm that woke up my generation from the American Dream.
During the real estate bubble of the mid 00s, I would get issues of the local magazine in the mail. Over time, these Key Biscayne Magazines became troves of a bygone era. This series takes images and pages from those magazines to create scanner art and databending interventions, unpacking a society obsessed with lifestyle and real estate, but disinterested in providing stable housing for families.