Luna Enriquez General Fine Arts Thesis Portfolio Spring 2022
Uncontacted
In the installation Uncontacted, primitivist anthropological approaches are analyzed and applied to the white suburban lifestyle of the mid-20th century as a method of decolonization. This project turns the white gaze upon itself, recontextualizing found imagery from the post-WWII era through layering and digital manipulation to create a series of risograph prints containing elements that reference the effects of white supremacist anthropological practices. The prints and the accompanying zine, An Indigenous Explorer Discovers Suburbia, are intended to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously. In this work, I act as both an agitator and a translator, strategically using the code switching I learned growing up with one white parent and one Native parent in combination with the visual language of suburbia to try to provide non-Native people with a unromanticized glimpse into the reality of contemporary Indigenous life.