Export Quality is about my search for a home and the construction of
culture and race.  I examined the varied places where I grew up and the
instability of moving around, of having parents from different backgrounds
with different value systems, and I made collages to illustrate my feeling of non-
wholeness, the pieces.  I photographed a series of self-portraits in which I
imagined what I would have turned out like had my mother never left Morocco,
my father never left Queens, I never left Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Israel, Tokyo,
Virginia, Yokohama, Osaka, Abidjan, Paris, Italy… I put myself in character, in
costume and poses and with props that either exploited stereotypes or were
based in personal history. 

            I put some collages together where the figure and the background match;
it is my imagined present based on a made-up history.  For the next set, I mixed
up the figures and background, taking them out of context, a closer truth to my
fractured identity.  In each collage, as a sort of wish fulfillment, I blended the
figure, allowing it to ease into the background; the viewer’s consciousness of it
as collage slips in and out.