Emily Artinian recently became executor for and also one of the heirs of her deceased father’s estate. If inheritance can be reduced to precisely described objects (as legal and economic structures tend to emphasize), one would say that this consists of real estate and property investment companies. For thisPLACEd, in her new, compound role as artist and executor/property owner, Emily considers the more opaque aspects of inheritance. Having lived far from the estate’s location in Pennsylvania since she was an adolescent, she investigates her own relationship to this land and people. She takes the name Poppy Engels, a heteronym encoding her uncertainty about her father’s drive for extensive ownership of property, something she often questioned him about in his lifetime. One strong sense – speculative, but insistent – is that this obsession was not unconnected to his own parents’ loss of home, and homeland, when they were displaced to the United States as refugees. Dead Dad presents portraits of this property in a series of photographs. An accompanying artists book reprises and re-sites the photographs, and, incorporating discussions Emily and her father shared before he died, adds textual meditations on the intricate legacy of inheritance and the complex emotions and responsibilities embedded in ancestral history.