Some questions are better answered by culture than they are by science. With increased obsession with DNA testing to determine cultural heritage (including a white American fascination with indigenous heritage), I wanted to see if my body could give me a visual indicator of my degree of indigenous blood. I explored and exposed moves toward settler innocence by tracing 17 generations in my ancestry to identify the last fully indigenous man and woman to produce a child, to whose lineage I belong. A physician drew two vials of my blood in the gallery which I then diluted with water by factors of four for each generation (since four gene pools converge in every child: maternal grandmother, maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother, paternal grandfather). Next I used the diluted blood to write the names of my ancestors with their respective diluted blood ratios as my ink. Looking through the vials of blood moving from 100% blood to blood so diluted that it is crystal clear, it became visually evident that my lack of redness is transparent. My ratio of indigenous blood to settler blood is for every 1 drop of indigenous blood, there are 32,768 drops of settler blood running through my veins.

DATE: 2017

MATERIALS: aluminum, cedar, acrylic, blood, vials, lineage, paper

SCALE: object

DIMENSIONS:

SITE: n/a

STATUS: complete

“Midterm Evaluations, Swing State Aesthetics: Ohio Artists for Freedoms,” review by Harrod J. Suarez, American Quarterly (vol 72, no 1, March 2020) Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ohio Artists for Freedoms (2018, group exhibition), Art Academy of Cincinnati.

SEEN/UNSEEN/NOT SEEN (2017, solo exhibition), The Muted Horn (defunct), Cleveland Ohio.