Colored Folk Explanation
The following is some of my intentionality in creating Colored Folk, feel free to approach it however you please.
The piece is a reflection of the nature of humanity, its place within existence, and the lived experience of its component individuals.
The work is comprised of three major sections of canvas. When viewed, one perception is a face, with the two eyes at the top, the black nose in the middle and the white mouth at the bottom; this is the face of humanity. The face being the locus of all of our perception, and thus all of our reality, I felt this to be apt. We must eat and drink through our mouths to survive, that and sleep are our biological imperatives. Smell is one of the oldest and most primal senses, largely forgotten in our ever-increasingly visual world, and yet no human architecture will outlast the genetic constructions of our anatomy millions of years in the making. The wide eyes on the top of the piece are our primary sense, the ultimate illusion.
Where you once saw a face, look again. It is also a representation of the act of sex, with the ‘eyes’ being the balls, the ‘nose’ being a penis, and the ‘mouth’ being a vagina. The moment of sex epitomizes the ultimate drive. Humans consume and survive, in order to reproduce to allow for more consumption and survival, all within a billions-year long tradition of natural selection to adjust itself more competitively with a fluid environment. The balls contain the seed of man, carrying with it the entire history of humanity. The vagina births the future. In this representation, the black penis is penetrating the white vagina so the viewer in this relationship is the child in the womb.
All the components are 1s or 0s. The black component is an upside-down 1 and the white component is simultaneously a 1 and 0. Interestingly enough, the black 1 will not fit into the void left by the white 1 in its displayed orientation, it is flipped, emphasizing its relativity. The green part at top are two 0s as well as an infinity symbol. Our self-hood is created by our relatively recent digital landscape. Information technologies like the internet, rather than solely creating a helpful abstraction of reality, seemingly have created a new reality into itself within which our brick-and-mortar world increasingly abstracts itself. However unsettling, it simply sheds light on how fragile and relative our perception of reality has always been. Additionally, the 1s and 0s allude to the makeup of the entirety of existence. Things are or are not, even everything that is not is coded within what is; any relationship or hierarchy otherwise is incoherent. Given that, we and our component parts, before we view them in relationships to which trends are identified and language is placed, at our most basic are equivalent to an infinite series of 1s and 0s. Additionally the 1, 0 and ∞ introduce the concept of representation which will be further engaged with in this work. Given the wide scope of the piece I used the most-used international representative form, the Arabic numerals. We use these numerals to communicate across more boundaries than any in the modern world, and yet these signals are just as much a construct as any other representative form. Is math real? You tell me.
The numbers allude to what is math, what is representation, is it eternal, is it relative? When the 1 is next to 00, it’s 100, but when below it one’s perception of it changes entirely. If the 1 were turned sideways it’d become a division function thus the whole would represent either infinity or 0 divided by 1 or 0, the answers to those questions should be clear if the operations were clear, but it’d seem they are not. Turn your head to the side and the equation 1 – 8 appears, yielding -7, obviously a language game rather than a reflection of rEaLiTy.
Let us focus on the top section, the most detailed part of the work. The bright green creating the infinity symbol contains designs in red, blue, and yellow. These primary colors make up the range of visual perception. The red and blue designs are the double-helix of DNA that determine our anatomy and thus our actions. DNA epitomizes where chemistry creates biology. The splashing dots of yellow represent reality occurring on scales larger and smaller than us. Both the molecular, quantum physics occurring microscopically as well as the heavenly, gargantuan galaxies that crash and burn in an ever-relative entropic mosh pit. The bright green was chosen to embody the energy of all of nature, its scales big and small, physics, chemistry, biology, with humanity as but a thread amidst an infinite weave.
From within the infinities of nature, looking out (only to realize within is component of without) lie the eyes of humankind, made up of the earth. You may be able to tell that the interior section of the ‘eyes’ or the infinity symbol, given all the aforementioned context, is pulling multiple weights. At this point, the ability of verbs to encapsulate clear relationships in the work begins to notably fall off, not due to a lack of intentionality but rather an inability of language to truly reflect said intentionality. Subject/object relationships are inadequate; temporal assumptions of English do not fit. I encourage the viewer/reader to approach it with patience and creativity if they dare.
The two blue/green circles are representative of the earth. Traditional projections of the earth, including maps, will attempt to flatten the globe into a plane. They do this to reflect the social necessities of geographic representation, including identifying relative locations for trade and political boundaries. My representation considers these established forms however would certainly not fulfill their purpose. The fluid application of paint mimics the fluidity of the oceans, the cracking of the continents as Pangea bursts into itself creating continents, mountain chains, deltas, and coastal plains. The fluid nature of the diluted paint allows for dots of blue amongst green (lakes) and dots of green amongst blue (islands), imitating the flux state of the earth’s landscape. The fluidity also is calculated to reflects truths of humanity, which has grown from Africa to inhabit a wide range of nooks and crannies amidst the landscape becoming a global species amidst the global flourishing of life generally. Additionally, the nature of political boundaries is fluid over time, including the disparate effects of those boundaries based on the arbitrary assortment of social capital amongst its individuals relative to how in-group/out-group politics determine access to space and resources. The most important takeaway to understand the earth (and life resurgent from it) is the tendency of structures to arise from the physical reactions of random collisions, i.e. natural selection, the water cycle, geology.
The most colorful part of the piece is made up of representations of the bodies of human beings as well as a variety of linguistic characters. The array of colorful forms are silhouetted, ghostlike in their appearance. These outlines were created from photographs of paintings, sculptures, and carvings of the human form sourced from the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, easily accessible online. The source material is culled from all the continents and ranges in origin from several thousands of years ago through the modern. On the bottom left, several white stick figures lay in a pile, dead, while those unfortunate few left alive labor to harvest their bodies. This stick figure portion, as well as the title Colored Folk, bring history and the racial division of condition into focus. Initially my intention of the entire piece was to portray a world in which Europeans were the colonized, slaughtered, raped, enslaved, had their cultures destroyed, languages decimated, etc., as opposed to the opposite reality in which we live. The purpose of this portrayal in part is to assert that had the winds of history carried certain events and resources another way, any group of humanity is capable of exacting destruction upon another and writing the rules of generations of hierarchical institution-creation to uphold a given order. Princeton University (the college I attend) is a prime example of an institution whose purpose is to graduate rich people to make them richer in support of a capitalist/white supremacist project (re: Witherspoon, Wilson, Firestone). Even this (my) anti-colonial project is itself a manifestation of the perceptions created by the colonial moment and its power to control language and social hierarchies reflecting these realities. The piece is produced with images from the Metropolitan Museum, whose collection is composed of the stolen heritage of colonized lands. Trapped within our very perception of the piece are the implications of white, black, and colored. English dictates White as pure, Black as putrid; white is the presence of color while black is the absence (although mixing all the colors yields black not white [science is full of assumptions and representations rooted in white supremacy]) Although our words, perceptions, and actions are inherently trapped in the creation of a social hierarchy to privilege some over others, as reads history, this piece attempts to break outside these constraints despite its inevitably fraught conclusion. So, just as the pile of white dead in the bottom left represents the aforementioned alternate reality, these white stick figures (inspired by cave paintings) become a stand-in for colored, colonized folk and in turn for any social division of labor/suffering be it race, gender, caste or rank. That is why their appearance in the lower part of the left eye is tear-like, and viewing the whole piece as a sculpture whose symmetry implies balance, the social imbalance is simply a part of a larger picture that remains perfectly (albeit cruelly) balanced. The ghostly-silhouetted figures include European (though mostly non-European) representations to indicate the truth that inherently homo sapiens (or however one wishes to call us) are on the same team. Our common goal as a social species, to become the perfect parasite of the planet, is helped by the creation of social hierarchies (no matter how unjust).
The inclusion of linguistic characters highlights the fact that language is one of the key determiners of human perceptions. We perceive things through the language we have, and linguistic associations determine what speech or actions we produce. What language is, be it written, oral, gestural, or otherwise, is an entire species into itself with its own history and tendencies that has ridden and guided the human wave. Language, although incredible in its own ways, is not some paramount accomplishment, it is an attribute of humanity just as birds fly, termites have agriculture, and ants communicate by puking into each other’s mouths. When considering language, the wholeness of humanity becomes readily evident. Take written language for instance, in contrast to oral language which is inevitably resurgent from any group of people within one generation, written language was developed only a handful of times in human history. All the worlds languages/societies saw the representational advance and adopted it. Similarly, a pure alphabetical system, where signs correlate directly to sounds, was only invented once and was implemented the world over. Figurative drawing occurred for thousands of years but perspective that closely imitates how the eye perceives things very far away only emerged recently. Personally, I find it fascinating how similar linguistic characters can appear to humanoid representation, a tendency that makes sense given their shared use and history. Language is a tool, and tools are something all of mankind eventually learns to share, a design feature not a flaw. Language in a narrow sense, (Spanish, Cherokee, Wolof) defines identity more reliably than any passing social construct of nationhood or ethnic group. The unity of religion, language, and political body in defining in-group/out-groups and thus closely held feelings of identity dates back to our time as hunter-gatherers which we were for the majority of our existence. Then, language, religion, and body politic were one, the purpose of individuals were one, the tribe. Back then language, religion, and political bodies were fluid in ways that individuals were not; just as they are today. The point of every human is humanity not the subjective intentions they may have for their own life, that is simply the shadow side of much larger designs. It’s difficult to overstate out how pivotal language is and how it is resurgent from us but uses us for its own expansive purpose, fundamentally married to the biological, chemical, physical project of entropy.
Holy hell, this is exhausting. I’ve only scratched the surface! Other ideas in random order. The piece is a sculpture, monumental and epic in proportions (almost twice my height). More land is represented than water, the inverse of our positionality in the planet but fundamentally we remain fluid (60% water). The piece is plugged into your perception as electrically as a circuit!
In Colored Folk all of these ideas exist simultaneously, overlapping with each other, informing each other, because they are in fact one (or noone).
