Counter-EthnographiesI approach archives, historical and personal, not as settled documents but as living pressures that still shape posture, desire, shame, and survival.
Counter-Ethnographies begins from the visual grammar of colonial ethnographic portraiture and the traveling painter’s gaze that classified bodies while pretending to simply record them. I borrow the authority of those languages, portrait composition, cataloging poses, and documentary cues, only to interrupt them from inside the frame. Rather than correcting the archive, I enter it through self-portraiture and temporal estrangement, creating images where the past loses its certainty and the present refuses to behave.
The setting matters. These figures are not isolated against neutrality. They are staged within landscape and nature as a charged site of belonging, extraction, fantasy, and projected origin. I cut and recontextualize fragments from ethnographic portraits of colonial Brazil and fuse them with contemporary interventions, folding archive and invention into a single, unstable body.
The works are primarily paintings, often with sculpted, built-up passages of oil that make certain elements visceral and alive, as if violence and desire had texture.
At the center of the project is a commitment to “and” and “in-between” rather than either or. Shame and pride, savagery and refinement, European form and Brazilian contradiction coexist without being solved.
I am scheduled to participate with Drama Queen as an exhibiting artist in In/Between 2026 at the Ford Foundation Live Gallery (Live Arts Lobby) at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th Street, New York, NY [ZIP]), with exhibition dates April 3, 2026 – June 14, 2026, and an opening reception on April 14, 2026.
