Curatorial Practice > Galvanized Suns

JP’s past films have explored themes such as the malaise of white-collar modernity, local histories, landscapes, and myths. His current work uses a substantial archive of home movies recorded by his parents to interrogate themes such as youthfulness and glamour, migration, rootlessness, working-class respectability, Latino identity, and disappointment.

A short film about upward mobility and working class aspirations, A Parent's Wishlist is about an object that could be found in many North American homes between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - a set of encyclopedias. Dragged from one city to another and across the country by my Chilean immigrant father, his Encyclopedia Britannica set came to symbolise his hope for a better life for both himself, and for me.