The EthNic Man
2021
Digital Media
0:00:13 seconds (Looped)
This work is directed at discussing the narrative of the western outlook on non-western, specifically African, “aesthetics”. It is a video sequence composed of a series of images of a black male with traditional African face paint as he strikes three separate poses in succession. The images were edited to look reference ‘Blackface’, which is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by performers of non-African descent to imitate the appearance of a dark-skinned person of African descent. Although the face paint is specific to Johnson’s Nigerian tribe (as there are different patterns of face paint for different tribes), it stands that the imagery of face paint on a black person majorly receives a response attributing it to a, foreign, and somehow “more ethnic” aesthetic. This work is meant to critique the imagery that is commonly associated with blacks when we speak specifically of blacks still living in Africa.
Sound: © “Heaven I Know” Gordi.
Acclimatisation: The land remains.
2022
Digital Media
0:00:13 seconds (Looped)
A series of sketches done over a set of postcards. The original designs were produced in a coloring collection designed by William Morris (a British textile designer). Morris was known to be a major contributor to the revival of traditional British textile arts and methods of production in the 1800’s. Ironically, I discovered this collection in Nassau, Bahamas, a place previously colonized by the British. And so, my artistic response in the act of designing over them acts as a reclamation of the natural land that was unjustly claimed and ties into the resilience of the natural world to always recover.
