Identisploitation: Playing with the Politics of Representation

Identisploitation explores charged representations of identity in pop culture through painted paper figures, video art, and garments. The complicated public images of historical figures, including the iconic Black performer, Josephine Baker, are investigated, pulled apart, and recontextualized as exaggerated, lifesize paper dolls. Grotesque embodiments of evangelical, conservative American femininity are satirized through character performance in video. Historical costumes and unattainable beauty standards are stretched and sewn into unwearable garments. Identisploitation is influenced by the transgressive work of Vaginal Davis, Grace Jones, Bobby Conn and other fearless artists who inhabit the outskirts of the mainstream art world. The concepts of disidentification, the oppositional gaze, camp, and satire provide a critical and (pop) cultural framework, primarily through the texts of bell hooks and José Estéban Muñoz. Identisploitation asks these questions: What do pop cultural representations look like recontextualized through a Black feminist lens? How does a garment critique the cultural establishment? This thesis project explores historical representations of race, gender, and sexuality, and their lasting significance into contemporary visual language and pop culture through my particular point of view as a Black femme visual artist.