Webspinna

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new york folk songs

Districts (Rewritten)

I'm a product of Washington, D.C. When I was growing up half (my parents were divorced Mom lives in D.C., Dad lives in Maryland) in the District, the whole world came out of the museums. They were always free, and you could check out all sorts of collections: art, taxidermy, dioramas, insects. COLONIALISM. My father would take me to a Smithsonian museum just about every weekend. I inherited his fascination with all things natural and strange.

Culture in D.C. was and remains highly segregated. Seeing African-American kids drumming on plastic buckets in front of these museums defines the District for me. But what's housed inside the museums defines my practice as an artist. D.C. was dual culture as dynamic grotesquerie - the torn canvas of a generation raised on and in this blurring of reality. Inside the museum was safe, codified "reality" - history defined by those who have authority to define it. Outside the museum was a more uncomfortable, exhillirating reality - history being made and defined by those who are living it.

This dialectic really prepared me for the present moment, where the boundaries between real and imagined, fact and fiction, inside and outside, are blurred. Where the artist's hand acts as a kind of mediator between the self and the fictions of the external world.