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I’ll let you be in my dreams, If I can be in yours (2018 - 2023 )

I’ll let you be in my dreams, If I can be in yours is a collaborative project made by Andres Gonzalez and Carolyn Drake along the US Mexico border. We have been partners in life and work since we met in grad school in 2003. Our family histories can be reduced to familiar stories. Andres’ extended family migrated from Mexico to California over a period of decades, settling in the San Francisco Bay. Carolyn also has roots in California – European farmers who migrated West along the Oregon trail in the 19th century. We have both fought, and at times failed, to defy the stereotypes we fit into. And while we are repeatedly confounded by the ways our differing cultural backgrounds shape our behaviors, the next moment we are confounded by the ways we defy them. The differences draw us together, but they are also a source of struggle, something we are constantly hashing out. 

The visual pairings we are making across the border reflect that struggle: to find balance, to relate, and to defy the expectations of our own storyline. We are making pictures together yet apart, looking at the same things at almost the same time. We are drawn to the ways identity is negotiated in the borderlands – people and towns and waterways that are part one and part the other, perpetually divided and crossing between. Our goal with the images is not to capture a unified identity or moment in time, but rather to contemplate the unfinished and continually complicated nature of human relations.