CWU senior art exhibition explores ‘Broken Nostalgia’

Can memory be captured through a photograph?

In “Broken Nostalgia,” CWU senior art student Karen Valencia explores the immigrant identity and what it means to be disconnected from one’s culture via the alternative photographic process of cyanotype, sculptural installation, and digital self-portraiture. Through rebuilding her childhood living room, the exhibition aims to immerse the viewer in the personal experience of remembrance.

An opening reception for “Broken Nostalgia” will be held Monday, December 2, from 5-7 p.m. in Gallery 231 in Randall Hall. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the exhibit will run through Friday, December 6.

“I grew up in an immigrant community,” Valencia explained. “Every single day, I was instilled with a sense of fear — a fear that my family and I would be separated from the country I was supposed to call home. I never felt safe. And so, because of the current political climate, I wanted to utilize photography to bring awareness to immigrant stories.”

Valencia identifies as Mexican American and is the daughter of immigrants. She has seen first-hand how racism has impacted her community, and she remembers how her family would sit down and contemplate for hours on what to do if they were pushed away by the government. These experiences of instability have influenced Valencia, as well as the work of artists such as Frida Kahlo, who explores the Mexican identity in unconventional ways.

Valencia works primarily with found objects and cyanotype, an alternative photographic process involving several chemicals that become blue when exposed to water. Utilizing archived family images from photo albums, she turns them into digital negatives, places them on objects of comfort, coats them with cyanotype, and positions them under UV rays. Afterward, the image is printed physically onto the object's surface — the blue evoking a sense of melancholy, echoing the notion of nostalgia through the immigrant lens.

She explains that these objects are not of Mexican origin.

“They are not the originals that gave that comfort,” she said. “They are merely American replacements, breaking that warmth that is accompanied by nostalgia — and with this series, one will look through the immigrant lens at what it is like to scramble for familiarity, recreate tradition, and live a life away from home.”

To see more of Valencia’s work, visit her website or her Instagram page, @karen.valencia7. 

Photo: “Enciende La Luz,” 2023, 26”x12”, found object, cotton, and cyanotype.