"Home Sweet Home" is a self-portrait series about the relationship I have with the house I grew up in. My house was and never will be an ordinary house, as it has been cycling through adverse conditions since I was three years old.
At the age of 3, the ceiling started to leak.
Almost a year later, we discovered that our house was slowly caving in.
At the age of 4, we swung in a steel beam with a crane and jacked the house up, like a car getting new tires.
When I was 8, after years of catching rainwater in buckets in our living room, we decided to rebuild the front of the house.
At the age of 9, we dug up the front porch and broke the main sewage line for the neighborhood- but only after we were approved to dig by the city.
A year later, my father fell off the roof and severed his wrist and broke his hip. While he barely escaped with his life, his left hand will never work the same way again.
At the age of 10, I moved out of my room so my family could finish working on the front of the house.
At the age of 15, the front of the house still was not done and I still did not have a room of my own.
When I was 16, I moved into the downstairs bedroom, formerly my dad's office.
At the age of 17, the declining economy affected my family.
At the age of 21, the house is incomplete. There are still open ceilings. Power outlets don't work. The roof still leaks, we have table saws in the place of beds, there are wires instead of curtains.
It may not be much, but it is home sweet home.
