Currently comprising of three photographs: Costuming Ethnic: The Artist and her Mother, Costuming Ethnic: The Artist and her Father , , and Costuming Ethnic: The Artist and her Grandmother , the Costuming Kinship project interrogates the coherence of race by performing the extent to which race fails to coherently apply within my own multiracial bloodline.

In each photograph, I posed beside a member of my family to whom I am related by blood while wearing acrylic paint and crude costume elements such as a wig, blazer, or dark contacts in order to appear to be the same race as they are. The conceptual parameters of the project dictated that I must be painted in person with acrylic paint, not digitally altered, and that the family member I was costuming had to be present for the entirety of the shoot. These parameters are purposeful: acrylic paint, with its plastic sheen and masklike quality, emphasize the disconcerting, artificial quality of the images, while the act of sealing my face and neck within this plastic ‘false skin’ embedded a quality of physical discomfort. Requiring that my family members witness and participate in the physical experience emphasized an emotional or psychological discomfort as well, illustrating the strain that such ‘corrective’ acts of identification created within our actual relationships. In the photographs where I costume darker than my natural skin tone, chilling echoes of blackface and the violent racial history of caricature, degradation, and appropriation from the era of American Minstrelsy on through contemporary hate crimes and racist parodies imbue the project with a third level of social and historical discomfort.

In short, the images are disturbing: they are eerily false, and politically wrong—even though they propose to be more “true” according to social constructions of race and family in the United States than the reality of our bodies could be. In this project, I am treating my body and experiences as a site of incoherence or rupture within those constructions. Calling the system of race into question, the work asks: “How can this be true while I am true?”

This piece was installed in a group exhibition at the Gallery of Visual Arts in Missoula, MT in 2014.
Photos by Liliane Evers, and Beth Korth