Research Statement

My works on paper – washy watercolor scrawled with graphite scribbles, pulpy cotton saturated with indigo suspended in tensile strips – reflect my material and interdisciplinary research on nation building, racial capitalism, and female labor during the age of empire and its residual effects on contemporary hierarchies of humanness, value, and aliveness. 

 

Historian Lisa Lowe proposes the “intimacies of four continents” as a framework for understanding how Africa, Asia, and Latin America were brought into relation, despite their vast geographical distances, by violent settler practices to acquire human labor, sugar, tea, and silk in the Caribbean. Taking on an art historical lens, my work explores former luxury pigments in the West – rich indigos, blushing cochineal, and ruddy madder – that were colored by forced agriculture, imperialism, and the appreciation of hues in lavish paintings and textiles over Indigenous, Asian, and African laborers. My long strips of dyed paper dismantle the distinction between precious pigments and low materials, speckled with residue from inkjet prints pulped to near oblivion and embedded with natural dyes. Human figures, landscapes, and architectural drawings merge, disturbing renderings of the idealized human body from Renaissance figure studies to challenge the conception of the human as separate from land and non-human matter.  

 

In works that feature traditional painting materials and the genre-specificity of plein-air watercolors, I continue to dismantle the racialized female form, domestic spaces, and urban landscapes. “Immigrant women’s bodies become surfaces,” contends theorist Gayatri Gopinath, “on which competing and shifting notions of home and homeland are screened within the realm of diasporic public culture.” My perpetually in-progress series As Elsewhere, As Horizon represents friends, family, and colleagues who reflect on how their mixed cultural heritages, gender identities and sexualities defy conventional boundaries for citizens and nation. Posing with props that they stretch and break, gazing at the viewer or ululating, my models become canvases for projections of sky in that luminous, in-between stage of sunset and sunrise. Then, in flowing gouache, heavy graphite, and swaths of exposed paper, they merge with chairs and table-settings, the jagged edges of rocks and sinuous contours of winding rivers, rendered in impossible sky-scape hues that subvert their categorizations as “women of color” by acquiring the hues of national boundaries and changing climates. 

 

In revisiting material histories of luxury value, displacement, and exploitation, my work seeks to transform notions of agency and aliveness for bodies that historically and contemporary been figured purely as laboring or extracted; geographies that have been divided into private property and national territories; and technology that has been deemed useful or dangerous with shifts in eras. In doing so, I am interested in the turn from biopower to what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as geontology, the fine distinction between human and non-human, Life and Non-life, and Mel Y. Chen’s exploration of the animacy of racial matter and queer affect. Dainty female watercolors and discarded documents allow us to ruminate on historical depictions of growing empires, idealized subjects, and desirable objects and ultimately re-envision contemporary imaginings of power, utility, and danger posed by agents across racial, gendered, national, species, and material bounds.