The trope of ‘The Tragic Mulatto’ begins with a mixed race person, ignorant to their blackness, living amongst their oppressors by slipping under the radar through conformity. However, through tragedy and change, they are forced to choose a path: live in their truths of multitudes or continue living with ignorance and self-hatred.
Through my exhibition ‘The Neo Tragic Mulatto: Forget Me Not’, I am breathing a new perspective into the narrative of The Tragic Mulatto. My multicultural upbringing and lived experience informs to work through how I visualize the intersection of the unconscious shadows built up from an individuals past traumas and the collective memory and experience that is tied with blackness.
By employing the use of distinct symbols like the Forget me not flower, wire fences, and the unfinished or distorted visuals allow me to reference metaphors that tether my work to reality and connect to my personal iconography. The use of the Forget me not flowers within the work my only reference its original meaning of remembrance and it's used as a symbol for Alzheimer’s, a type of dementia that distorts perception and memories making it hard to distinguish passed from present. But its purpose in my work is to evolve its meaning by using it to represent the past holding onto you and you intern holding onto the past. By doing so allows me to explore the fickleness of memory and the ways in which trauma and the passage of time can distort our perception of truth and reality.
‘The Neo Tragic Mulatto: Forget Me Not’ questions the reality of tropes and stereotypes in American culture and how they can shape and limit the perception of blackness. The work calls for viewers to embrace the complexities of the past and recognize how it shapes the present and future. The distortion of the past has allowed for the illusion of change to enter our collective consciousness morphing into a surreal narrative about who we are and where we come from.
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