Strawberry Fields Forever, 2024. 70.5” x 61”. Mixed media painting, linoleum relief prints, and rice paper collage on bamboo and cotton paper cyanotypes. Installed at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA. Photography by Connie Zheng.
Strawberry Fields Forever is a ‘memory map’ of Watsonville, CA, although one might describe it more accurately as a painting with some cartographic elements. The work depicts a geography built up almost entirely through oral histories shared by descendants of the manong/manang generation in Pajaro Valley, as part of the Watsonville Is In the Heart project.
The background builds up a dreamlike terrain of the Pajaro Valley constructed not from GPS satellite imagery, but from memory. One layer, for example, consists of a composition of relief prints of fruits and vegetables, based on a schematic diagram of farm produce in Watsonville during the 1960s-1970s, which I created after reading through hundreds of pages of oral history transcripts from the WIITH archive. The streets depicted in the painting — not all of which are main thoroughfares of Watsonville — appeared in oral histories and photographs shared by community members who contributed to the archive. As an ‘outsider’ to the community, it was my honor to be able to access these shared memories. What meaning does a place have, after all, without the stories of its inhabitants?
This was one of my first experiments in shifting my map-making lexicon away from an aerial, largely colonial perspective that relies heavily on didactic text elements. With this work, I sought instead to play with an increasingly experimental cartographic language that emphasizes the embodied experience of moving through places thick with memory and change. By drawing upon personal anecdotes and oral histories to build up a topography of trees, beaches, waterways, farmland and personal gardens, the landscape shown in Strawberry Fields Forever exists somewhere between the present and the past. It also oscillates between different points of view, as linear perspective, a bird’s-eye-view and the 1:1 indexicality of cyanotype enter into loose conversation with one another.
Strawberry Fields Forever was originally created for the Sowing Seeds: Filipino American Stories from the Pajaro Valley exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. I conducted the research for this work by relying extensively on the Watsonville Is In the Heart archive, a multi-year, NEH-funded project led by a team of scholars at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in collaboration with The Tobera Project.