Inherited and Re-made brings language, as an articulator of internalizations, persuasions, fears and assumptions, to human bodily scale. This new work is a deeply personal approach to the many ways I seek to get at our collective and unique experiences of being born into imposed power structures; how we understand and reflect on positionalities so dependent on time, culture, and family conditions; and how we re-instantiate, analyze and grapple with that which we are given. Consistently inspired by the concept and book of the same name, Racecraft, has given me a framework with which to examine and grieve my own lineage. Authors Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields liken racecraft “to mental terrain and to pervasive belief. … racecraft originates not in nature but in human action and imagination. The action and imagining are collective yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine.”

Quotations from family members are visually signaled through machine-sewed, single-use plastic detritus textile. I make sense of these words as expressions of intergenerational trauma, internalization of hierarchies, and the coping with confusion as a result of immigration. For example, “It’s understood” was commonly spoken during my upbringing to indicate that communication is not necessary as one should express their understanding of and love for family through enactment of expected behaviors and choices. These desires reflect the results of many strands of my lineage (the earliest starting in the 1890s) undergoing the process of assimilation—implicitly forced expeditions to discover and categorize what is normal (and not normal).

With radiant barrier insulation to reflect our distorted world, I incorporate quotations from documents and speeches that have contributed to the birthing and entrenchment of capitalist machinations, racial hierarchy, climate denialism and forever chemicals. For example, “it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer” was written in a late 19th century pamphlet by Celluloid Manufacturing Company, founded by John Wesley Hyatt, an inventor credited with early contributions to plastic’s creation. The phrase references the colonial-capitalist exploitation and ironic optimism at the origins of plastic. The desire for synthetic materials grew as animal populations were decimated and the extraction of their body parts could not keep up with capitalist production e.g. elephant tusks to make billiard balls.

All words are based on my handwriting and each sentence is distinguished through a different shade and hue variant of yellow. In the built environment, yellow is a common color associated with caution, emergency, wait, construction, maintenance—something out of the ordinary or between the binary. I embrace yellow to reclaim the color assigned to me by the bio-racist bucketing system. These color categories have been with us for hundreds of years and are just one of the historically spun up threads that keep being rewoven into our shared tapestry. Viewers can traverse through the stuffed yellow words which may remind them of their earliest years when what was observed and experienced continues to be so shaping.

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant

Photo credit: Constance Mensh and Raúl Romero

All images are part of Conjuring Cruelty at Vox Populi