 Hi, my name is Makita. Thank you for coming. And I just want to say thank you to more Riley and Linda Knoughlin I'm really proud to be part of this exhibition. It's very exciting. I Was introduced to feminism before I was introduced to ideas about race By introducing the idea that gender is a social construction as opposed to determined by biology Feminism set the basis for me to think about race from that same position I state that now because while I do not speak about feminism in the rest of my talk I credit the work done by women as part of the feminist movement as setting the foundation on which I base my arguments The anomalous is a phenomenon which cannot be judged by its relation to a standard Impartial and owing no loyalties. It is a threat to all identity thinking. Can everybody hear me? Yeah, that was a quote by Steve Baker from the post-modern animal. I Became black when I was 10. It was similar to becoming a woman which also began that same year each had its own debut Previous to age 10. I was unracialized and pre-pubescent Some people might say that I was born black and I just didn't know it or understand it until I was 10 But that's ridiculous. It assumes that race exists Which we know is not true The PBS special the myth of race Noel Ignatieff's book how the Irish became white DNA results from the Geographic project in which people of one skin color meet their cousins with different skin colors Taught us that race exists only as a social construction Which is not something one is born into we are born into society, but we have to grow into our social constructions growing into our current current social constructions means growing out of inter and trans ethnic mobility out of quick and easy language acquisition out of gender ambiguity and Into a position named for its relationship to the center. You are a simulated minority hyphenated or people of color My father is Indian and my mother is African-American By the time I was in fifth grade. I was frequently asked the question. What are you? What I hear from adults now is not much different. Which do you identify with more being black or being Indian? Both questions position racial identity as something that is exclusive and Quantifiable our collective history of the one drop law and the cultural phenomenon that a white woman can birth a black Baby, but a black woman can't birth a white baby is the context of these questions It is those questions within that context that I have continually responded to in my work. I Can trace my attempt to envision an alternative to race through each development in my art The history of art from India Reflects the global conflict between domestic traditions and Western cultural and economic dominance The paradigm has a slightly different but interestingly similar manifestation in African-American culture in which post abolition mirrors post colonization in Both cases one strategy of the oppressed group is to reassign meaning to the dominators tools via appropriation and alteration irony hybridity and self representation in this way artists and individuals Establish the validity and vitality of their ethnic traditions in complex dialogue with the reality of the global dominance of Western culture and ideology The confluence of elements with different cultural origins in my painting titled suckle is an attempt to do just that Suckle is the first painting. I made that begins to embody the complexity of my ethnic experience in Hindu religion the God Ganesh has the head of an elephant and the body of a man in My piece the relationship is reversed the body of a comparison to Asian elephant with a black man's head Looms large above the girl. She sucks on her cultural traditions and they change her Both she and the elephant are in an ambiguous field The modernist grid is present as a stand-in for the rigidity of racial categories But the grid is dissolving and you can't see that very well in this image But there are these and incised lines on this piece His sorry the jeweled elephant floats as if lifted from an Indian painting His body is locatable in one set of references and his face from another The gold leaf tooth is more at home in Vi magazine than in the illustrated Ramayana The black mass on the right is a displaced organic shape a bush or a cloud or one half of an afro And this piece is 64 inches by 80 inches and it's oil enamel glitter and gold leaf on canvas And I have two details The animal alone and the animal in intimate relation with the human is a recurrent image in my work Having not fit easily or comfortably into society's racial categories and having to fit and having failed to pass litmus tests from both sides I was sometimes referred to as an exception and I have always felt like an anomaly Animals offer me an alternative to human identity and racial belonging Thinking as animals we are released from personality with animals. We shed social categories Steve Baker in his book the postmodern animal refers to the anomalous this way The anomalous is a phenomenon which cannot be judged by its relation to a standard Impartial owing no loyalties and inhuman it is a threat to all identity thinking It is a phenomenon of bordering an edge the word anomalous itself carrying from deluge and Gattari the sense of designating the cutting edge of de-territorialization as With other set senses of the cutting edge It is a phenomenon of the limit the farthest dimension of a multiplicity To know this to have access to this limit knowledge is of course to be a sorcerer It is sorcerers who know that it is always with the anomalous that one enter enters into alliance to become animal There are already exceptional beings who are primed for such becomeings Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position at the edge of the fields or woods They haunt the fringes and countering the animal at the border It's therefore it seems as a sorcerer that a human being makes an anomalous choice Strikes a creative alliance and thus enters into his or her becoming animal These descriptions make it difficult to think of the sorcerer the human who is able to make an alliance with the animal other Than as an artist This quote addresses the position of the margin as a creative opportunity Which is my response to my own social lack of fit It also provides a context for understanding my use of the animal and This piece and the next are called Harold one and two and they are each 30 inches by 40 inches and our enamel and walk wax charcoal on paper in This next series tsunami generation I am again in relationship with animals the first four pieces of the series were done prior to the Asian tsunami at the end of 2004 and the final four pieces were done afterwards in The pieces I made after the tsunami the space has altered and the water has come up The red of the girls dress from the beginning of the series now depicts blood These are each 24 inches by 18 inches and our enamel and gouache on watercolor paper And I have some images of the individual pieces a few of them and some details I'm also interested in landscape and how landscape itself contains cultural implications Indigo violet is an attempt to apply an oil painting materiality of thick fin and painterly brushstrokes To a piece that derives its flatness many of its shapes and stylistic characteristics from Indian miniature painting So I'm again here thinking about formal hybridity This triptych called bridge encapsulates much of the central ideas of my work a Figure in a landscape perches on the edge of two distinct spaces For much of my work. I was thinking about the tuck the text the jungle book by Rudyard Kipling Which is a story about a boy in India raised by wolves in Kipling's biography and in the main character Mowgli. I found complex parallels to my own ethnic experience Mowgli is physically and psychologically caught between the village and the jungle his unreconsiled identity resembles the internal struggles Experienced by multi-ethnic people native peoples African-Americans and other groups who are faced with a double consciousness as Archetype Mowgli proves the individual ability to challenge assumptions Revised culture and rewrite oneself. He cultivates a man animal intelligence Entirely unique to his experience and thereby serves as a model for creatively navigating internal conflicts He is like one of the sorcerers that Steve Baker speaks of a true anomaly Simultaneously man and animal and neither man nor animal This is the final piece in that triptych This piece which is in global feminisms was first exhibit exhibited in a show I titled after a passage from the jungle book the title of the show was dancing on the hide of sheer Khan in addition to his identity conflict and close relationship with animals Mowgli also reflects my aesthetic and conceptual interest in childhood. I think of the figure as much of my work as almost self-portraits and also as Imagine portraits of Mowgli like Mowgli when he dances on the hide of sheer Khan the figure in this piece titled boogie woogie Assumes a gesture that can be interpreted in multiple ways Defensive but also irreverent in boogie woogie the hybridity I began in earlier work is now more fully realized The human has merged with the animal and a host of disparate codes of painting are used in tandem Here in deepest darkest. I come again to landscape I'm interested in the color of the darkness for which I did not use any black in part This piece is about the visual perception of actual color in tension with the idea of something being black Many of the shapes that comprise the piece are from the landscape of Indian miniature painting But rather than the enamel like finish of burnished gouache. This has a thick impasto of oil painting I wanted the dark color to contain the complex ideas and associations of blackness Both as a color and as a racial identifier without the presence of the black body I have been heavily influenced by Indian miniature painting and Indian popular art as well as the Figuration of ancient Egypt and Mayan civilizations as well as many contemporary artists Including several that are represented by works in the exhibition global feminisms My strategy is to view and use the history of mark-making like language as many movable elements to be cut and pasted in Infinite new combinations. This is the way I think about painting and its continued survival And this piece is called woogie boogie It is oil on canvas and a seven feet by six and a half feet And it was made as a partner piece to boogie woogie, which is the piece in this exhibition And here is a detail My work is about a paradox in American society in which language art and the media Persistent referring to race even as race is now known to exist only as a historic myth and deny Multi-ethnicity even as multi-ethnicity is now known to be the future American majority My figures and the paintings as a whole depict neither race nor ethnicity But rather individual subjectivity as a heterogeneous combination of cultural and natural elements The fusion however embodies America's denial of this view the combination is awkward tense and precarious It establishes itself making playing the process of its construction But it is established only within the realm of make-believe Thank you