The Ascension of Oppression
The Piece That Began This Project
While I was at The Oxbow School, a semester-long, fine-art school in Napa, California, I was tasked with creating a Final Project about anything I wanted. This was certainly not my initial idea, but its creation came from what I learned about myself during that process.
Throughout my entire life, I was afforded a sense of confidence in myself and my capabilities because of the color of my skin. I was seen as a person rather than a representation of an entire culture or entire race. This, coupled with the American Dream that I was raised on—that I could achieve anything I set my mind to—put me into a compromised position when designing this piece.
I was initially determined to create a piece around misrepresentation and lack of representation of Native Americans in our history books. The more I researched, the more I learned about their staggering overrepresentation in statistics like drop-out rates and poverty. But the more I learned, the more I understood that as a white person, I could not represent and take advantage of their culture for my own gain of completing this piece. As I fought to help an oppressed culture, I found I was simultaneously oppressing them through my abuse of white privilege.
In The Ascension of Oppression, a red carpet is rolled out over the staircase to further invite the white population to ascend the stairs that are only being held aloft by those they have oppressed. To rise, such as we have throughout history, we must trample those we have placed at the bottom, where we continuously exploit their forced oppression. These persecuted populations are represented using foam coated in plaster to show how white people have forcibly shaped their culture and how the continued coats of white culture suffocate them, gluing them to the injustice of being beneath the staircase. And yet, the oppression describes both populations, where the white population has inflicted it both times: exploitation and self-imposed oppression of ignorance.
ITS PROGRESSION
Returning to my home school, A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, I decided to continue this project, delayering the aspects of myself that gave me this mentality that just because I could, also meant I should.
This project branched out into two different areas: 2D and 3D. Despite their common theme, both became unique representations of my path toward understanding my white privilege.
Delayering My White Privilege: 2D
These pieces feature literal layers of the drawing. Most layers are painted on transparent projector paper, then superimposed on top of each other for the final image. As I stacked these individual images to create the final piece, I could how small influences each contributed into that larger perspective.
Delayering My White Privilege: 3D
These pieces feature more of the intricacies of my white privilege and what it has given me, like economic advantages and access to educational growth. The more I sketched and researched, the more advantages I discovered I had that were given to me strictly because of the color of my skin.
