My Roots Are My Branches is a body of work and accompanying zine I made for my undergrad BFA thesis. The title represents the mirroring effect of brown peoples’ pasts and futures; how the traumas of our pasts inform and transform into the resilience of our futures. For this project I researched the works of post-colonial theorists and my own family history. The ideas of Stuart Hall, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Amiri Baraka, and others allowed me to understand the construction of my mixed identity and its relationship to colonization, historically and presently.
The full written zine is uploaded at the end.
For the art-making process after my research, I primarily worked from these two quotes: “The physical body functions as the signifier of the subjectivities in the individual,” Stuart Hall. My body is the best portrayal of where it comes from; I’ve included my hair and teeth in the work to embody this.“If I draw this image by hand, through some alchemy of love and labor, can I turn it into something else?” Sadie Barnette. This quote comes from Barnette discussing drawing her father’s FBI files by hand and the power that comes from that slow process. Since the research was so much emotional and intellectual labor, I found the process of creating the art to be its healing counterpart. The process of working from family archives felt like meditation, getting closer to my own family, most of whom died before I could know them, and our origins. The prerequisite physical tasks before beginning each painting (hammering together the wooden bars for the frames, stretching and stapling the canvas over them, neatly tucking the corners, taping the edges, and priming the canvas) enabled the creation of each to act as a kind of meditation.
As organic material, the dirt reflects the rhizomatic systems that constitute identity. Dust to dust; what are the connections between the land and my body? If viewers choose to, they can dig (or excavate) the objects mixed into the pile: my teeth, my sibling’s teeth, seashells, coins, tech bits/bytes, fruit skins. These small objects act as artifacts of identity, where their implications in historical/social contexts can be tied to my own.
“Written in the Woodwork/ Gabe’s Second Birthday” 36 x 36" oil on stretched canvas This painting is based off of a Polaroid of my Uncle Gabe’s second birthday in Guyana. It shows my grandmother with all of her children (my mother second from left.) In the wood of the table there are shells and a horse, a crucifix, Guyana, New Jersey, and a scary dog.
“Dogs Still Fight in Eden” 40 x 30” oil & hair on stretched canvas considers the duality and two-ness of mixed identity, as well as being a mutt of mutts, and sitting in these conflicting identities amidst a personal utopia. The braid of my hair (collected February 2021) is included to further embody my physical self into the painting.
24 x 30” each, oil & acrylic on canvas “Rosalind Paris” “Shemuel Wong” “Juan Nuñez Sr.” “Amelia Gracia” These portraits are my grandparent’s passport photos, rendered in the colors of their country of origin (Guyana, Guyana, Puerto Rico, Spain respectively.) For immigrants, the passport photo represents a moment of transition from being ‘native’ (although none of my grandparents were ever truly native to their home countries) to being ‘foreign’, forever altering their lives and those of their descendants. Passport photos look similar to mug shots. The white background of their pictures is the only large swarth of color they all share. (For my two Guyanese grandparents I used reverse skin and hair colors from the flag to show how different their origins were even though they were both born brown in the same country.)
