MasterStudy: Snow White Clapping

Artist Statement

My work engages with the archive of American visual culture, through the act of subjunction. It projects a complex subjectivity into the pictures and moving-images which are disseminated through mass-media, culture, and mediate our experiences of the world around us. I use found images, collages, drawings, paintings, text (both written by myself, and appropriated), and recurrent filmic and artistic motifs as mediums for my personal storytelling. This produces a commingling of polarities; a collision between introspection, and observations of the material world around me. The results of this practice become a disjointed narrative, which rejects linear totality, and makes space for irresolution, contradiction, and the completeness of the human experience. Western culture is designed to flatten its subjects into types, scrub them, perfect them, or erase their existence all together. In doing this work, I rein-scribe my specificity into a visual field that was built with the intention of diminishing it.

I was originally brought to the work that I am doing now by a simple question. How do you visualize what it would look like to be black, and free? This is a very simple question, that only presented more questions; distinctions to be made, then ruptured, and an unending montage of points and counter points. My search led me to reconsider the ubiquitous image; the 2D picture plane as a mass-communication technology developed to perpetuate white supremacy. Animated film in particular became a site for me to explore various coalescing histories. Among them were film-as-craft, and its transition to industrialized work; labor, as dually fetishized by spectatorship, and erased, in the promotion of the novelty of the medium, and in the passive spectatorship generated by combination of a rapid succession of moving images, and light; racial, sexual, and gendered stereotyping and the continued connection between blackface minstrelsy and the development of American entertainment.

I began looking to back in my own visual lexicon, to the art, movies and cartoons that I had been surrounded with as a child. A single frame stuck in my mind’s eye, like a pin. A still from an animated film I had seen before, and forgotten. In it, I saw answers to the problems I found with depicting liberation within a visual field that seemed to be unwilling to hold my intricacy, and multiplicity. It held up a magnifying glass the screen itself, revealing it to be a framing device. A tool created and utilized to promote the values of the same white supremest hetero-patriarchal society that I felt sitting on top of me, silencing me. It made visible a frame that inscribed itself on top of the past, outlining how we exist in the present, in an attempt to shape how we will determine our futures.

‘Persistence-of-vision’ refers the optical illusion that occurs when images in a sequence are shown in rapid succession of one another, creating the illusion of life. Animation and cinema are produced from this optical trick. Author So Mayer describes fascist ideology as also being dependent on persistence-of-vision. It is a single story about a people, framed as the official account, and presented as a linear progression of events, which then becomes replicated in culture, via mimesis. The queer act of ‘folding time’ is what occurs when artists are able to recall representations of the past, and to revoke its totalizing function by ‘folding’ back in the very complexity that it is attempting to erase. I am interesting in making work which speaks to the past. In my films, the camera lens condenses all objects to a single visual plane. This allows me to reactivate material that already has a history, and imbue it with a new purpose. I am able to ‘fold’ my specificity back into the screen, making a direct passage to the archive, creating in it an ‘anarchive’.

This work stems from the need in me to affect those pictures, films, and television shows that made up the aesthetic landscape that surrounded me, and shaped how I developed a sense of being in the world. It is also an acknowledgement, that the space that would have made a younger me understand that my difference is where my beauty lies, didn’t exist. The effects of that cannot be undone. We cannot un-make the violent scrubbing of the real lives in written, cinematic, and pictorial record. We can speak on our own realities. Fascism depends on being able to reduce the humanity of its subjects, in its various forms or recording and depicting events, so as to justify violence against those deemed undesirable. Anchoring my work within the complexities of my lived experience provides me with a means to find solidarity and communion within a lineage of artistic resistance to oppression. It gives me strength, and the ability to speak my truth, to power’s silence.