Empty Pocket Waltz

Installation (2016)

Empty Pocket Waltz addresses the implications of cultural appropriation in relationship to the effect of colonialism on individualized culture. I explore the issue of reverse appropriation within the context of contemporary society. I begin to express these concepts through material application and within the process itself.

Looking at the similarities between the structure of a contemporary society based around capitalism and the inherently imperial nature of colonialism and drawing the comparison between the forced cultural assimilation bestowed unto the indigenous at the hands of colonialists and the barriers that are created around us by the very nature of capitalist society. Through the use of photographic digital collage and the juxtaposition of valued and devalued found objects, a visual narrative of the evolution from colonialism to capitalism and the complications that have been born from it are subtly revealed.

I assigned traits of a nonspecific Indigenous culture to portraits of individuals from the 1920s to mimic the process of taking a valuable aspect of a subservient culture and re-appropriating it within a dominant culture without consideration of its origin or meaning. The images are created from contact prints made using found glass plate negatives. To make the prints appear more authentic to the period by creating the attributes of the individualized culture by hand drawing them on acetate and then laying them on top of the negative to show how things potentially could have appeared if reverse appropriation had occurred much earlier in history. To address the concept in the context of contemporary society, I incorporate technology to create distorted renderings from the original photographic prints. The distorted images speak of the way aspects of the individualized culture are lost between the distance of time from actual existence, subversion, and re-appropriation.