Through Venus.
In being a mixed woman of both Filipinx and South African decent, my identity has been complex subject in my life. During my upbringing, I constantly went back and forth between many different homes, on both sides of my family.This ebbing and flowing of different cultural spaces, each with their own set of rules and values, strongly influenced my sense of self, causing me feel fractured and disjointed.
As a young girl, I remained confused and overwhelmed, constantly questioning my own identity.Today, this has led to a personal exploration of my Black and Asian woman identity, which is still evolving. In the past, it has been challenging to define, but with time, and strong influence from my black feminist foremothers,I now feel a spark of deep curiosities for the ways in which identities can be determined for one’s self.
My work serves as my own attempt at, not only clarity, but also a sense of healing and self-actualization as a Blasian American woman. A path I must forge on my own. In this series, I seek to explore and determine for myself what my personal identities mean and how a photograph can aid in the formation of that definition.
Through self-portraiture and still life photography, I want to create an act of reclamation over my own narrative by visually expressing a journey and questioning of my identity. Present throughout the work are gestures that engage with the body and the surface of skin, the site for my existence and my personal history.Within the work, I implore elements of my past as well as my current reality,touching on subjects such as Catholicism, misogyny, anti-Blackness, and the fetishization or exoticism of mixed raced Black women.