These photographs are images of doll heads I create through a photo transfer process on fabric. The heads are sewn and stuffed to appear like pillows. I photographed these heads in different settings and environments to manifest their relationship to that particular surrounding. For example...
Doll heads (red, white & blue)
The term red, white & blue is a term that refers to the American flag. Here a “Chinese” laundry bag, easily found in New York City represents the American flag. The heads that occupy the bag are not “white” but a multi-racial group. Objects in a laundry bag imply that they are going to be washed. In a country were otherness is excluded and / or denied, metaphorically the bag represents what seeks to “wash” / strip identities of their uniqueness.
Doll heads (eyewash)
Misrepresentations of the world and of ourselves come to us visually first. The main idea behind this photograph is to cleanse the eye of those images yet cleansing the eye, as it appears in the photograph, is painful. This photograph was informed by Luis Bunuel’s eye splicing scene in the surrealist film An Andalusian Dog. The idea that one can rid or wash our eyes of misrepresentation belongs to the world of dreams, yet the power of imagination to compensate for the sociopolitical forces that are oppressive should not be underestimated.
Doll heads (black face)
Black and brown children around the world have to battle their ways not only past concrete negative images of themselves in the media, but also past the impression that the pervasiveness of Caucasian imagery means they are not part of the "real" world. In this photography, I use one my dolls of my childhood…a white doll with red hair which appears to cradle the large black head. Taking as a spring board the image by Walker Evans, where a black child cradles a white doll, here I wanted to invert the predominant meaning; the black becomes the “real” as a way to reinforce positive identification of other.