Installation • Spring 2020
An Obligation to Do One's Best explores myth and reality at home in a small southern town. The artist explores her displacement in the American South by confronting and acknowledging the violence of being a white woman in the South. These houses are monuments of confrontation—a reminder of the parallel between being a neighbor band and an outsider living in the veil. W.E.B. Du Bois describes this boundary, both physical and metaphysically, between the North and South eloquently as a veil in his search for understanding the racial prejudices of the Jim Crow era. The threat of the artist's gaze labels her as aggressive in the racial divide in this southern town. In these liminal landscapes, the viewer/spectator becomes a collaborator in the mythos of racism in the Southern narrative—the denial of not only its racist past but also the strides of the Civil Rights protests. The static images perpetuate the romanticism and storytelling the South is known for. At the same time, the occupants might well be complicit in the systemic racism or the victims of 400 years of injustice. The participants become faced with their understanding of how they see. The artist is calling into question who narrated these stories, whose history we are referencing, and where the root of our implications begins. Is it problematic that these houses cannot merely be houses? The American South, the house, the name, and the family's history are complicated and seemingly transparent to those on the outside. However, the stories of those who live here still exist in the space between myth and reality.