Penthesilea Collage

My work 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. I assign traits of a non specific 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 dominate culture, without consideration of its origin or meaning. The images are created from contact prints that were made using found glass plate negatives. In order to make the prints appear to be more authentic to the time period I applied the attributes of the individualized culture through the process of hand drawing them on acetate and then laying them on top of the negative before exposure, to show how things potentially could have appeared if reverse appropriation had occurred much earlier in history.