White Skin, Black Kin: a Creole Conversation Piece (2003)- This multi-media video installation re-creates an eighteenth-century painting to examine postcolonial racial identity and representation. Staged within an opulent plantation Great House, the fictitious “family portrait” reveals hidden stories beneath the surface masquerade that allude to interwoven racial histories.

Here, the eighteenth-century “conversation piece” painting is reclaimed as a way of addressing the performance of Creole identity (and patriarchal / colonial power dynamics) on the plantation stage. This kind of group portraiture traditionally showed its subjects engaged in some form of communication with each other in a private setting that described their habitat. It was characterized by the stillness of the figures, and by minute attention to details of furnishing and interior decoration from which the viewer was invited to construct (genealogical) narratives across time relating to the still figures.

In this re-staged (fictitious) family portrait, the white Creole female appears as “actress-text” in a Great House tableau that unfolds to explore Creole family relationships. Posed against an ideologically invested background of patrilinear ancestry (portraits on the wall), the female family members (mother and daughters) articulate the gulf between symbolic masculine power and silenced feminine domesticity. I subvert this unequivocal form of portraiture by “re-presenting” the family in its entirety. While the white family members visually articulate (frozen) social and familial propriety in their well-decorated drawing room, the illusory black “family” members are shown to symbolically unravel the inconsistencies within the household through devices of visual and / or sound intervention. Through their constant “ghosted” movement within the pictorial space, and with their “behind the scenes” conversations, the black / interracial family insists on a presence that functions to rupture the artifice of the officially staged (historical) portrait. Personal narratives and dramatized dialogues overheard by the attentive viewer expose submerged stories of sexual indiscretion. The inclusion of the master’s armchair (on which sits a child’s topsy-turvy doll) placed near to the c. 1730 Portrait of Seale-Yearwood Esq. (a photographic reproduction of the portrait in the Warmington Gallery), together with the inclusion of the video projection, Sisters, further help to allude to these “family” secrets and to destabilize the master narrative.

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