With “Family Vacation”, my intention is to examine the often difficult, yet inevitable intensifying of
familial relationships that happen in the vacation setting and why it is that these experiences take
on such a dramatic nature. Often this family drama occurs when our expectations of the fun we
should be having are too high, and we find ourselves forcing unrealistic levels of enjoyment onto
these interactions. We pressurise ourselves to be nice and understanding, to be team players who
play the game of pleasure with forced energy, only to please others.
While examining my childhood memories of family vacations within the context of my more recent
experiences, I have been able to find small cracks in the artifice of the situation, which I consider
to be moments of truth. It is in these moments that we allow ourselves to be bored, to be tired or to
admit that we wished we had just stayed home.
By representing these moments, using both candid and recreated portraits of different families,
and juxtaposing them with images of vacation environments that evoke this same isolated feeling,
I hope to share the paradoxical nature of the family vacation with the viewer.