Gianna Sergovich is a recent graduate from the Conservatory of Art and Design at SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Photography. Having grown up in a small suburb in Upstate New York, her interests have taken root in small town life, it’s inner workings and how it shapes and is equally shaped, by the people that reside there. She considers herself an anthropologist as much as an artist. Having briefly worked as a printer in Connecticut after graduation, Sergovich now works and lives in Upstate New York.
…If Blood Is Thicker Than Water
As an adopted child, the artist is physically at odds with her parents and culturally out of sync with her Korean heritage. Through this photographic project, she attempts to illustrate and decipher her dealings with the transracial adoption paradox. This phenomena is the development of a set of conflicting feelings concerning identity within a transracial adoptee, particularly those coming from a minority culture into Caucasian families. Part photographic inventory, part documentary, and part family album, Sergovich sets out to record her parents' lives to see where she fits in amongst all of their things. She takes on the perspective of the ‘other’, while simultaneously still belonging.
This work is an effort to unpack and explore feelings of guilt, identity, cultural socialization, and family, by reinforcing the ideals in such a way that the recreation can only be viewed as disturbing in its faultlessness. In turn, the work attempts to debunk the myths that are fed by preconceived notions connected to suburbia, the modern family, and to deconstruct those ideals with questions about exactly who’s perfect, and what we are trying to live up to.
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