White Out, 2022-
Found objects and photographs, ceramics, various sizes
In recent years the U.S. has seen a rise in “white anxiety” related to white peoples’ fear of displacement by people of color, as well as an increase in racist violence. As a white person who grew up in a wealthy and insular environment, I’ve gained a new awareness of the privilege my skin color has afforded me. To this end, reading Richard Dyer’s classic text Whiteness impacted me deeply. According to Dyer, though Caucasian people’s skin is not literally white, "white people" have appropriated the symbolic qualities of that hue, such as purity, spirituality, transcendence, and neutrality. Through our whiteness and the advantages it affords us, white people dominate society while attributing our success to our special characteristics and achievements as individuals. Dyer writes, “White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange."
My installation White Out is a response to Dyer’s call to make whiteness strange and thereby apparent. In it, the ubiquity of the color white in the things around us and the symbolism white objects carry functions as an analogy for Caucasian people’s relationship to whiteness; it infuses who we are and what we do and affords us great power, and yet it’s generally invisible to us. By immersing the viewer in a mélange of white objects and images and juxtaposing them in ways that create “strange” (and humorous) interrelationships between them, the work aims to destabilize whiteness and “out” it – and thereby make it visible for the viewer and available for critical reflection, deconstruction, and action.
White Out is a fluid and evolving project; objects are added, recombined, and rearranged over time, and each exhibition of the work is unique.
Found objects and photographs, ceramics, various sizes
In recent years the U.S. has seen a rise in “white anxiety” related to white peoples’ fear of displacement by people of color, as well as an increase in racist violence. As a white person who grew up in a wealthy and insular environment, I’ve gained a new awareness of the privilege my skin color has afforded me. To this end, reading Richard Dyer’s classic text Whiteness impacted me deeply. According to Dyer, though Caucasian people’s skin is not literally white, "white people" have appropriated the symbolic qualities of that hue, such as purity, spirituality, transcendence, and neutrality. Through our whiteness and the advantages it affords us, white people dominate society while attributing our success to our special characteristics and achievements as individuals. Dyer writes, “White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange."
My installation White Out is a response to Dyer’s call to make whiteness strange and thereby apparent. In it, the ubiquity of the color white in the things around us and the symbolism white objects carry functions as an analogy for Caucasian people’s relationship to whiteness; it infuses who we are and what we do and affords us great power, and yet it’s generally invisible to us. By immersing the viewer in a mélange of white objects and images and juxtaposing them in ways that create “strange” (and humorous) interrelationships between them, the work aims to destabilize whiteness and “out” it – and thereby make it visible for the viewer and available for critical reflection, deconstruction, and action.
White Out is a fluid and evolving project; objects are added, recombined, and rearranged over time, and each exhibition of the work is unique.
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