My senior capstone for DAAP at the University of Cincinnati explores the ways nostalgia is formed, triggered, and preserved through personal memory. By interviewing members of my own family, I collected handwritten stories that revealed how sensory details – colors, objects, and small moments – shape our emotional relationship to the past. These narratives, along with collected family photos, became the foundation for a visual and interactive experience designed to capture the hazy, selective nature of remembering.

To translate this concept into a physical form, I overlayed cyan and red images, custom patterns, and textures, creating dynamic scenes that shift and dissolve depending on how they’re viewed. When a red acrylic sheet is placed over the work, certain elements appear while others fade into the background, mimicking the way memory highlights some details and obscures others, as well as a playful nod to the idea of “rose-colored glasses”. This interaction invites viewers to actively engage with the piece, experiencing firsthand how nostalgia filters and reshapes what we choose to hold onto.