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Photography installed in a white gallery

Brayan Enriquez: Like Hills Made of Sand

“You were late,” said his uncle–a greeting and an accusation. They hadn’t seen each other in over fifteen years.

For this new body of work, Brayan Enriquez traveled to Mexico for the first time to visit his extended family, many of whom he had never met due to travel restrictions or had not seen since their deportation from the U.S. over a decade ago. Throughout his time in Acapulco, Mexico, Enriquez used image-making to introduce himself to both his family and the landscape. The resulting intimate portraits are interspersed with artifacts from his family’s archive, mining lived experiences spanning generations and nation-states to image the invisible effects of U.S. immigration policies.

The first meeting is warm, with familiar features rearranged on someone new. What is the meeting ground between kin and uncanny, neither strange nor familiar? Enriquez’s cropped and fragmented images create a narrative that dwells in the borders, sharing a family knowledge drafted from memory out of reach.