Decolonized Aesthetics - Imagined/Re-Imagined
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
— Audre Lorde
This series engages the 19th-century process of platinum palladium prints to depict contemporary African Americans’ re-examination of photography and its intersection of history and the ways the medium was used to perpetuate racist stereotypes concerning Black bodies as inherently dishonest, childlike, and lacking intelligence—used to deny black representation and disseminated the idea of racial inferiority.
This body of work merges the history of our unpaid labor and the economic engine of cotton to reposition Black bodies, not as stereotypes and the propagandist idea of racial inferiority but reinterprets Black bodies as having agency and control of their own labor. It considers the roots and routes of the Atlantic slave trade and its creolization, creating a fusion of multi-cultures by reconstructing the narrative and positioning Black bodies not as property and labor but rather as a creolized people of agency and the privilege of owning their own labor through the purview of the Black Atlantic world.
— Audre Lorde
This series engages the 19th-century process of platinum palladium prints to depict contemporary African Americans’ re-examination of photography and its intersection of history and the ways the medium was used to perpetuate racist stereotypes concerning Black bodies as inherently dishonest, childlike, and lacking intelligence—used to deny black representation and disseminated the idea of racial inferiority.
This body of work merges the history of our unpaid labor and the economic engine of cotton to reposition Black bodies, not as stereotypes and the propagandist idea of racial inferiority but reinterprets Black bodies as having agency and control of their own labor. It considers the roots and routes of the Atlantic slave trade and its creolization, creating a fusion of multi-cultures by reconstructing the narrative and positioning Black bodies not as property and labor but rather as a creolized people of agency and the privilege of owning their own labor through the purview of the Black Atlantic world.
