Esther Parada was trained as
a photographer, but her work, in its monumental scale and ambitious nature, is
not traditionally photographic. She gathers and blends texts and images, freely
altering both. She then forms the composite whole in installations that sometimes
encompass an entire room.

In Past Recovery she creates a history of her immediate and extended
family. She transforms a small photograph of the wedding anniversary of her
great-aunt and great-uncle into a giant family scrapbook, with photographs of
family members from various periods in their lives superimposed on their images
at the banquet.

“My sister’s face at age
two,” wrote Parada “is juxtaposed with her own image thirty years later and
with that of a great-aunt whom we never met, although family legend has it that
they were cast in the same mold. Similarly, I see other members of that family
gathering through the filter of my own cumulative experience.” Past Recovery is a montage of personal
memories, with all stages in life’s cycle represented.