Creole Portraits (2002-03) - This series of black and white lithographic prints on frosted mylar presents ambiguous images of the back of female heads as “portraits”. Recalling nineteenth-century abolitionist illustrations, they play on Marcus Wood’s observation in Blind Memory (2000) that slavery’s memory has been objectified in museum displays through emphasis on the tools of torture rather than on the slave body. By illustrating whips, collars, chains, and branding irons entwined in exquisitely braided hairstyles, these images subvert the reading of these historical artifacts. Invoking hair as the site that is the second most important corporeal sign of race, these inverted portraits also seek to “name” the women lost to history. As sites of both ritual enactment of love between women (the slow, careful act of braiding hair) and the pain associated with the physical and mental degradation of slavery, such hybrid images resonate as metaphors for the weight of history in contemporary postcolonial societies. Both attractive and repellant, they seduce the viewer and open up a space for contemplating the shared (repugnant) experience of slavery and its after-effects. The strict regulation of the hair into defined Afro-centric styles also ironically conflates eighteenth-century European fixations on hair / wigs (worn by men) as signifying social order, with the (female) Creole’s ability to empower herself by expressing her (non-European) postcolonial cultural identity through hair design.

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