Difficult Love, proposes an alternative Atlantic history, performed in scenes by women channeled from colonial painting imagery and archives. Remixing the works of Agostino Brunias, an 18th-century painter who depicted (for European audiences) various scenes of daily life and social class in the Caribbean, I reconstruct parts of these works to explore representations of gender, racialization, and the development of consumer buying power as a primary marker of identity. My interest in using historical source material is not to reanimate the past, but to consider how artworks that “naturalize” women of color to representations of cultural assimilation, are often depicting economic narratives that attempt to normalize inequity and invisible labor. In this world, I play with modes of science fiction as a tool of translation to think about the colonial project. Conditions of Sci-Fi mutability allow for time travel, multiple embodiment, and hybrid spaces to complicate identity narratives and interrupt history. The exhibition considers how identities are formed in love and in resistance to the brutality of colonial world making.
photo credit: Stephen Petegorsky