Confetti

16 prints
10 cm x 12 cm each
2021

During the early days of the pandemic, paper towels and toilet paper were scarce or seemed scarce, making these everyday goods extremely valuable as shoppers stocked up and limited their use of single-use paper products.

While I gingerly pulled at the seams of a paper towel roll during this era of purchasing limits, I recalled my grandparents’ habit of conservation. Vietnamese refugees to Canada, they would fold and tear sheets of paper towels into smaller squares, even reusing them repeatedly once they had dried and wrinkled.

A routine of thriftiness was paired with one of aspiration: my grandparents played the Lotto 6/49 on a near daily basis. For this series, I hand-cut the digits from lottery slips, a laborious task that, to me, imbues these flecks of paper with high value. In Confetti, disposable paper is cut, cropped, layered, and reused in combinations of labor with decorativeness, utility, and commodity.  

Limit 1 per customer at Costco.

Group exhibition
Storytelling
First Floor Gallery, Santa Clarita City Hall, CA
2023