Tamara Zibners

My recent series Hold You is born from photographs in which my son and I are touching, documented moments of a physical connection. The compressed pictorial composition, near-total abstraction, and over-saturated color in my digital drawings and cut-up inkjet prints are visual representations of information and emotional overload I observe of the outside world while existing in relative peace within the confinements of domesticity and motherhood. The result is bright and enticing - but also too bright, like a warning or discomfort signal, borderline grotesque, and an amplification of reality.

The detritus of my camera and of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

How Bad Can It Get is a series of real and imagined scenes that use photographic sources as underpinnings to a drawn and colored surface. Cultural color associations and formalisms of cartooning are invoked to read a situation that somehow is instantly recognizable. The combination’s goal is to create a poignant admixture of recognitions and reactions that amalgamate humor, terror, lust, rage and misery while maintaining the falsely safe experience of a colored cartoon.

On October 4, 1944, as the Communists approached, my grandparents Alvina and Harijs Zibners – or Mimi and Pipi as we fondly called them – and their newborn son, my father, fled their hometown of Saldus, Latvia. They spent five years as refugees in a war-torn Germany and eventually relocated to the United States. Their story is one of exile and immigration.

On October 4, 2006 I moved to Latvia in an attempt to reconnect with my deceased grandmother, Mimi. I too felt displaced in California, and was hoping to “go home” to Mimi's homeland.

This work is an illustration of my attempt to root myself in a foreign place, and my Mimi’s desperation to return to a place in which she felt rooted.

In this work are texts from Mimi's Diary from 1943 to 1971, and my photographs from 2006 to 2011.