Tiana Graves

Growing up, most of my weekends were spent driving around different neighborhoods on the lookout for garage and estate sales with my mother. It led to a complete fascination and curiosity into the lives of strangers from a time not of my own.  I eventually began photographing estate sales specifically as a means of documenting and preserving these remnants of past lives. 

In recent times, I have felt like we are stuck on fast-forward in a disposable culture- trends come in and out quicker than they can even be defined anymore, but when you walk into an estate sale, the whole world is set to rewind and it’s like stepping into a time capsule.  Perfectly preserved decades worth of a life sit stagnant on view; however, what tends to follow the sale of personal belongings is the sale of the physical space.  A lifetime’s worth of belongings are sold off in the span of a weekend, and that glorious shag carpet and wood paneling gets ripped apart and gutted as the home eventually pops up on the market, a vacant shell of its former inhabitants awaiting its new tenants.  These new dwellers will have hardly a clue as to what their newly financed walls once contained.  

My photographic work comments on the passage of time in regard to the object and how that object becomes a relic and represents eras of a life.  My mixed-media, sculptural works collect said objects and pieces them together to form new narratives born out of the once discarded memories.