Keri's Hybrid Suspicions explores ideals of white beauty. It is centered around aspirations to achieve other people's ideals, to manipulate visual prejudice, to construct an identity that is correct, starting with the skin.
Skin color, is one of our most visible physical features, and because it is visual it is omnipresent. It is omnipresent and it is unavoidable. Skin colour has a long history of oppression. Whereby the colour of a person's skin has been used to divide people into racial categories. The categories are stigmatised as once people are grouped, meaning is assigned to that group and so racism is born. The organising of people by colour is an exercise of imperial power. The racially ambiguous do not conform to a system of ordering. Mixed race people can expect to be asked "where are you from?". In answering this question, the impulse to place an individual into a pre-existing heirarchy, will be fulfilled. To resist imperial desires to oppress the 'other' racially ambiguous people can choose their answer. They can indulge in exoticism and choose two random countries, they can pass as a nationality that is higher up the hierarchy, they can deny the impulse altogether and simply say Britain, all three of these options resist racism in a different way. But one or all of these choices, these resistances will lead to what Keri terms "mixed race guilt" Mixed race guilt occurs when you deny your heritage, deny your parents, deny your culture. Whilst a desire to follow Frantz Fannon's proclamations in Black Skin White Mask, the long term affect is damaging as you internalize a disgust for the process of hierarchies and positions of privilege based on race, you become suspicious of everyone, you suspect everyone of visual prejudice, of everyone trying to box you up and label you.
Skin color, is one of our most visible physical features, and because it is visual it is omnipresent. It is omnipresent and it is unavoidable. Skin colour has a long history of oppression. Whereby the colour of a person's skin has been used to divide people into racial categories. The categories are stigmatised as once people are grouped, meaning is assigned to that group and so racism is born. The organising of people by colour is an exercise of imperial power. The racially ambiguous do not conform to a system of ordering. Mixed race people can expect to be asked "where are you from?". In answering this question, the impulse to place an individual into a pre-existing heirarchy, will be fulfilled. To resist imperial desires to oppress the 'other' racially ambiguous people can choose their answer. They can indulge in exoticism and choose two random countries, they can pass as a nationality that is higher up the hierarchy, they can deny the impulse altogether and simply say Britain, all three of these options resist racism in a different way. But one or all of these choices, these resistances will lead to what Keri terms "mixed race guilt" Mixed race guilt occurs when you deny your heritage, deny your parents, deny your culture. Whilst a desire to follow Frantz Fannon's proclamations in Black Skin White Mask, the long term affect is damaging as you internalize a disgust for the process of hierarchies and positions of privilege based on race, you become suspicious of everyone, you suspect everyone of visual prejudice, of everyone trying to box you up and label you.
Cycles of Mixed Race Guilt
Keri's performance begins at the beginning of this cycle the first step is denial. Denying any sort of ethnicity and attempting to pass as white involves an active attempt to change the external, physical appearance to reflect white ideals of beauty, to inevitably pass as white. Keri is concerned with passing. Passing stems from an innate sense of survival, the kind of survival that often requires imitation or a change in form, the change of appearance to imitate and match our surroundings. Passing also requires negotiation. Negotiating society's ever changing values. Negotiating what we inherit and what we absorb from our environment. In order to demonstrate the historical ways in which woman have achieved the white ideals of beauty, Keri returns to a text found in the archives of London. Utilizing a text that directs women on "How to be handsome" written by a man in 1889, Keri incorporates disturbing new rituals into her daily routine. Keri's desire to pass as white is a social commentary on the lived experience of racism and the steps she and others have taken to both resist and adhere to white ideals of beauty.