My Lack of Redness is Transparent asks whether visual evidence can resolve what cultural and scientific narratives often leave unanswered. Against the backdrop of commercial DNA kits promising clarity on questions of cultural belonging, I turned to blood as both a substance and a metaphor, to see if blood itself could answer the question at face value, with more honesty than DNA testing. The work measures the distance between me and the last fully Indigenous pair of ancestors to whose lineage I belong. In the gallery, a physician drew two vials of my blood, which were then diluted stepwise by a factor of four for each of seventeen generations, tracking the convergence of maternal and paternal lines back to the last fully Indigenous man and woman who appear as a parental couple in my documented lineage. With this diluted blood, I inscribed each ancestor’s name alongside their corresponding ratio, until the redness disappeared entirely, leaving behind only clear liquid. The redness disappears, but the lineage does not. What emerged was a record of material disappearance in which the visible evidence of descent becomes imperceptible while the connection itself remains continuous. The resulting object is a physical index of descent, operating as a visual grammar of removal and persistence. It provides a conceptual frame for understanding how something can remain present even when it can no longer be seen. At the time of completion, the process was investigative and diagrammatic of distance. As a durable object, however, it also affirms a lineage to which, as an emergent expression, I still very much belong.
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DATE: 2017
MATERIALS: aluminum, cedar, acrylic, blood, vials, lineage, paper
SCALE: object
DIMENSIONS:
SITE: n/a
STATUS: complete
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“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.