Bedside Manners / Street Facades |
Taster’s Choice / Safety *Close Up* |
K=Fawn Fetched |
“The joy of being tied up bound down whipped beaten drawn quartered stretched broken into the ground is this – the mind is free”. [Thereafter Johnnie by Carolivia Herron]
My work explores the dynamics of incest and the sub-divisions of it’s mental language -against the physical structure specific to the father daughter relationship.
In the piece Bedside Manners/Street Facades -the external and internal reality of sexual identification are played out against what is perceived to be normalcy within the home. A fathers touch, becomes the catalyst for a broader view into the naiveté of sexual vocabulary to speak from father to daughter. What is understood and misunderstood in the hint of touch is shaded while the thoughts of the child are outsourced to the outside world. The need to remain “child” morphs from a fun representation of pleasant days of running through cool hydrant water…to being “flushed” and “fluid” in ways she has no language for. It becomes an internal/external sexual assault.
Fawn Fetched lends itself to the hunt…A chase …yet no one ever sees the shooter. Removing the perpetrator allows one to see that the plucking of her youth is beyond the scope of one…and can indeed multiply, as the shooter desires the unraveling of purity, when the father begins to inject other information into his actions. When internal humiliation, becomes fodder for outside torture behavior. The tease, the hunt, the capture.
Taster’s Choice/Satiety delves in how twists on scripture/text are used to explain away actions of indiscretion. “He who is full loathes honey, but to the hungry, even what is bitter stays sweet” [Proverbs 27:7]. General laws of over indulgence play around a chocolate donut and Taster Choice ads-coffee and chocolate are addictions unto themselves, surrounded around the addiction to youth and the need to connect to the wholesomeness- yet not knowing the line where adult trips to childhood destroy. She has become sugary substance- no longer viewed as nothing more than quick fix for adult fantasy.
All of these explorations work within an even larger framework of my thoughts on how black women/girls have become commodity as well as the idea of consumption of black women/historically and in present. What is forbidden considered tradition as passed down through enslaved condition, reconditioning the value system of family connection- when girls/women become “playthings” and how language frames these actions within the gender power structure.