american malaise.03 Artwork - Limited Edition of 50

In being who I am, I and everything I create are inextricably linked to a social and political identity. When I overthink my ideas, I find myself feeling they are beholden to something or someone else, some greater history that I have no control over, though I am constantly considering. I wonder how I will engage with this history and when and where I enter into it; this kind of discourse, for someone like me, with a penchant to over analyse, is overwhelming. I live in a reality where lines are not so clear, where when someone looks at me, they may see many things or only one. It becomes the onus of the person who is beholding to decide or determine what I am. I say what as opposed to who because that is usually what people try to arrive at either directly or indirectly, sensitively or insensitively. The path and the conclusion are always different, but in the end, it is always the same. Me, as object, not as myself; me as whatever someone else sees, and all of the feelings and experiences they bring along with that conclusion. I remember someone who eventually became a friend of mine, an older woman, said to me in our first open conversation, where no one else was present: “What, if I may ask, are you?” She asked in such a kind way, but she had no idea this question was crushing, that in every interaction I have with someone, I wonder when this question will be asked, when they will ask, demand, a what, a definition. I have always wondered if this is a means of tethering ones’ self to a reality, to a system of knowing, a reason, an explanation, an answer. In a much more jarring interaction, a colleague who never became my friend, asked me on multiple occasions: “What are you?,” “Are you Black?” They kept asking, twice in private, and once in front of someone I did not know, which was embarrassing. They kept digging, becoming more and more invasive, ignoring my clear discomfort and evasion of their questions. I still wonder sometimes at what they were hoping to arrive. What purpose would my answer serve to them? How could a sense of knowing impact their reality? How could I right their world, tether them here, with one, simple answer? The issue, here, is that answers are never simple. They are never enough. This is a concept made evident when one gives a young child a simple task.