The studio.
When I was roughly twelve years old, I was able to observe, quite clearly, that having light skin was a special kind of existence. The way that my white classmates and teachers treated me versus the callous way they treated my darker skinned friends was extreme. This observation evolved and stayed with me as I grew into adulthood. However, only within the last ten years did the notion that my racial identity was a construct with benefits and biases that I could examine through my art, take hold.
The idea to examine my racial self took on a special kind of urgency when I moved to China in early 2013. Even though I was a minority there, I was treated as though I was special. Once again, I was able to observe the stark contrast between how Chinese people treated me versus how they treated my darker skinned friends and coworkers. My investigation of my racial identity intensified when I returned to America in 2016 and only deepened in the summer of 2020.
Before I begin a painting, I research historical source materials at the Library of Congress, then I collage that imagery together with my own photographs and drawings of family members, and friends together. Beginning this way enables me to extract and combine information and then repackage it in the form of a painting. I then employ a combination of realism with abstraction to discuss how racism manifests in the real world. Some aspects of systematic racism are easy to discern and are thus rendered in a precise way. Other facets are more obscure and are executed in a nonrepresentational way.
My current aim is to examine the construct of race from two vantage points. One aspect is an objective view that falls loosely into the category of history painting. The second aspect is a subjective micro view where I investigate the many ways racism has affected my family, i.e. what was lost when my father’s side of the family morphed from being “Not the Right Kind of White” in 1817, to fighting proudly for the Confederacy in a single generation. I also examine how that shift created a schism between the Native American side of my family that has never healed and how being viewed as white has affected my personal outlook on the world.
Similarly, I scrutinize and deconstruct the notion of race as “something that is normal, “ by using plants as a metaphor. Many of the plants depicted in my paintings are invasive species, but because they were brought to North America from Europe so long ago, these plants now seem common and normal.