REVEALING MYTH: HARLEM
Revealing Ethnography: Harlem
Performance and installation
2007
Drawing inspiration from the work of James Van Der Zee and Zora Neale Hurston, I wanted to chronicle my time through people's interaction with space and happening. Performing eight hours a day for three weeks in a store front in Harlem, I made masks of my face out of newspaper clippings in silence with no breaks. Most of the visitors were passersby and local residents. The door was always open for people to stop in. I chose paper because it is a material that defines the time we live in- disposable and recyclable. My performance was a living archive, revealing the experience had in the space through the masks and photographs of visitors in the mirror. I would write a log to hang up with the photographs I took and masks I made everyday creating an installation in the space. For the final performance, I brought food and drinks and asked visitors to take home any photographs they were in.
This project was made possible through a chashama visual arts award.