Hey you dumbass, you can't make work about blackness, you're white!
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Well, sure, but if only black people can talk about race, then race will continue to be marginalized and white america won't do anything about racism or the underlying causes of inequality because they won't be invested in it.
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But what's this weird racist thing with this african mask?
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The mask is standing in as a mediator, a filter of 'other' that mirrors the pervasive 'otherness' that gets assigned to blackness. It is generic, in that I bought it on eBay and don't know anything about its provenance, and so is both symbolic of my ignorance and my distance. Also, if I was going to make work about race, I figured I should be willing to walk around with an african mask on the end of a stick and a giant camera and risk being attacked by all those angry violent black people I see on TV.
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See! You are a racist!
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Well, if you mean that my views of what blackness is are defined more by media imagery than by personal experience hanging out with black people, then you're right, and that's my point. That's the mask that we see, the symbolic exterior representation that generically comes to replace whoever is really behind it. Even the black people I know seem somehow outside of "blackness"; blackness is somehow this other, more sinister thing. I'm interested in the sites that form the concept of "black america," and how fragmented and inadequate that representation is, from both behind and in front of the mask.
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Why are you doing this?
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Well, I've always been interested in the ties between representation and the self, and in the way my views of the universe are biased by a combination of my own ignorance and pervasive visual imagery. And, since my brother-in-law and nephew are black, I've been hanging out with a lot more black people recently, and it freaks me out that somewhere in the back of my mind I'm still thinking "Gee, they don't seem black!", which has led me to try and figure out what that definition of blackness is, and how it got there.
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All pieces are 20" x 16", high-gloss C-prints, face-mounted to plexiglass.

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