where are we now portrays the aftermath of my mother’s passing in Los Angeles in 2009. My family had immigrated from Korea a few years before. Images in the book depict moments in my struggle with grief, depression, and my dad’s alcohol abuse. Repeated imagery reflect the recurrence of events – how I dealt with the frequency of my dad’s alcoholic behaviors; and the cyclical return of the memories after moving away from home.

Majority of the images (pages) in the book was created as linoleum cut prints. A set of four linoleum blocks were printed in two matrices – one single image in a comic strip format, and the other in repetition of the strips. Some images simply repeat 27 times while others transform throughout the multiple reduction printing process to emphasize the time of passing. On these prints, the reductive states are printed next to the previous states, and they have a look of film strips. The rest of the images was digitally drawn in a similar manner.

In the book, two formats of 25 images were screenprinted. Single comic strip images are placed on the left pages, and repeating images on the right. The page order of the single images with captions reverses from that of the repeating images in the book. The repeating image on the first page, therefore, is the same as in singular form on the last page. This placement of two matrices leads the images to circle around from the beginning to the end, and back to the beginning of the book. It resembles how images on each page repeat. By doing so, I wanted to visualize how these memories have come back to me over and over again.

where are we now was published by Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY in 2019. It is an edition of 50. Submitted photos are credited to Alec Logan Smith and Women’s Studio workshop.

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