Whiteness Brooches
Copper, Brass, Acrylic Urethane, Stainless steel
The project explores and draws attention to white privilege and the normative standards in our culture. Utilizing text in the work is as a primary vehicle for expression of a complex subject. The text on the brooches are based on collected statements and rendered in typographical images that depict the rigidity and ambiguity of whiteness. Jewelry is a marginal art form that is oftentimes underestimated in its potential for messages. But it can retrieve a medium that is unexpected, conversational, intimate, detailed and personal.
The whiteness brooches are nuanced and hard to decipher. The brooches are markers that reveal how much non-white people meet racism in every moment in everyday subtle actions. It is not a giant protest, it reveals an intimacy, an attention marker that happens between just one person by one person.