Visual Disconnect

I've been thinking a lot this summer about the fact that there is a disjuncture between my physical body as other people see it and my identity as I see it through my understanding of my past. I want to remake myself so that others are unable to project "ethnicity" onto me. I don't want to be perceived as "white" but I also don't want to be perceived as "other." This dichotomy bothers me. Either you are "one of us" or you are "exotic."

I am especially sick of being called "exotic" by white people. But, I also embrace it, I make a point of highlighting my "ethnic" qualities so that I can avoid whiteness. Because to be perceived as white would be to erase my mother, to erase our whole past, to forget my grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents, etc. It would be to forget the daughter of a former slave and her dutch master. It would be to disown the little girl from Rajasthan kidnapped by marauders and sold to the British as an indentured laborer. It would be to erase the double colonization of the bodies of my fore-mothers.

I want to be Guyanese, I want to be Indian, I don't want to be exotic. Is it possible to be that? I'm not so sure.

I think I'm exploring this uncertainty in the pictures I recently posted on my site (this one, this one, and this one).

Re-boot

So, I've obviously not been posting here. I'm not sure why, but, I would often start a post, and then never complete it. Now, I have two reasons to recommit myself to this space. First of all, I am taking a video installation class that will focus on social platforms (like facebook, youtube, blogs, etc.) and I am required to keep a blog for the class. The other reason is that I am now able to have a more direct connection between my website and this blog, and I would like to use this connection to develop a discourse with friends about how my work is developing.

Let us return to the high hopes of the past...

Prelude

“and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”- Derek Walcott

It is rare that you come across an artist who can speak so eloquently about what it means to live that their work gives you that moment of stillness, that moment where you recognize yourself outside of your Self. I chose to create this blog to get my ideas out of my head, to let them float around somewhere else, in the hopes that somewhere down the line, in two years or twenty, I will be able to write a few words, or create an object or performance, that will effect someone else as deeply as Walcott’s poetry has effected me. Here, you can expect to find bits and pieces of my own work, but, perhaps more importantly, you will find what I am struggling with, what I love, and what I am discovering for the first time. Femme Couteau (“woman knife”) is a nod to Louise Bourgeois and the pioneers of feminist art who, I believe, are sometimes too quickly written off in our “post-feminist” age. Here I will be the “woman knife”—the contradiction, the ambivalence, and the ambiguity.