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    Now reading: artist genevieve gaignard shatters biracial stereotypes

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    artist genevieve gaignard shatters biracial stereotypes

    Referencing everything from police brutality to the dramatized femininity found in John Waters films, Gaignard navigates the anxieties of her intersectional identity.

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    Genevieve Gaignard’s photography frequently draws comparisons to Cindy Sherman’s conceptual explorations of female identity. But the Massachusetts-raised, Los Angeles-based artist prefers to align herself with Diane Arbus. Or, more specifically, to the freaks and nonconformists captured so frankly in Arbus’s black-and-white images. Gaignard’s own polychromatic portraits explore her identity as the biracial daughter of a black father and white mother who grew up in a Massachusetts mill town — an upbringing she says was marked by a strong sense of invisibility. In this context, it’s easy to understand her feeling drawn to drag performer Divine and the other dramatized female figures found in John Waters films. Gaignard’s Instagram account @creativecurvyginger depicts a recent meet-and-greet with the Pope of Trash — to which she wore a “Surfboard” Beyoncé sweatshirt.

    Gaignard’s new show “Smell the Roses” is currently on view at the Californian African American Museum in Los Angeles. Blending installation and sculpture with character portraits that balance humor and heartache, it references racial stereotypes, kitsch and pop culture, and pressing social issues including police brutality. We talked to Gaignard about hair politics, notions of passing and privilege, and using art to inspire necessary change.

    Did you move around a lot as a child? You grew up in Massachusetts but your installations also reference post-Katrina New Orleans and the 30s south.
    Nope, I’m a Massachusetts girl, born and raised — though my family has Louisiana roots and that informs a lot of my perspective as an artist. I was named after my Southern grandmother, Genevieve, who raised her family in New Orleans. I’ve made work in her NOLA neighborhood, where I feel strong familial ties that I want to keep exploring in my future work. Even though my work is often inspired by site-specific spaces and geographies — I often shoot rural Massachusetts towns and have been really inspired by LA — I don’t hesitate to reference locations that hold social and cultural significance that aren’t necessarily my own. I draw the most inspiration from the spaces that feel familiar to me, but it never ends there

    How do you come up with the different characters that you embody in your portraits?
    My characters are often very personal and a lot of the work I do — especially at this stage in my career where the work is getting more visible — has become about negotiating what feels honest and real and urgent for me to portray. Since my work is so personal, it’s become important for me to strike a balance in making work that is really vulnerable and often painful while also keeping a sense of playfulness and joy in the creative process.

    You mention John Waters as a major influence on your work and did an amazing Divine costume on your Instagram. And one portrait character seems to be a nod to Hairspray. Did this movie have a heavy impact on you growing up?
    I grew up on stories of John Waters and his work as told by my mother, who spent part of her young adult life in 1960s Baltimore — so Waters was always on my radar. He tackles dark cultural realities with a sense of comedy and camp, and that’s an approach that really resonates with me. I think I’m drawn to Hairspray specifically because it addresses subjects I explore in my work — black and whiteness, the plus sized woman, and the dramatization of the feminine. As an artist who appropriates and reclaims many corners of culture — including film, music, television, and politics — Waters is one of many cultural heavyweights whose work inspires me, but certainly not the only one.

    Your work includes lots of black pop icons, pin-up girls, religious iconography, and dolls. How did these figures help shape your identity?
    We live in a hyper-visual world. My work is a lot about consuming culture and spitting it back out in my own language. That means asking tough questions about the objects and images we’re surrounded by. I create psychological spaces that put a lot of different objects and visuals together and I’m much more interested in the questions these spaces create than any answers they might offer. I think a lot of people see me as a white girl making work about race, but my art is about undoing that assumption. I use a lot of gendered, racial, and religious iconography in my work and like to juxtapose certain stereotypes.

    How do you hope art can help people understand issues such as Black Lives Matter and police killings that you address in the show?
    Art is a powerful tool for social change. I wish we didn’t have to rely on things like art to understand that black lives matter, but that’s not the reality we live in. I hope to create a visual language that is both accessible and unforgiving in articulating the importance of black identity. With my light skin comes privilege and I am committed to not getting complacent with that privilege.

    The self-portraits play with so many different elements of black and white beauty aesthetics, particularly hairstyles and clothing. How do you use hair, beauty, and fashion as a way to explore identity and navigate different social spaces?
    For people of color, hair has a really complex social history — [see] Solange’s new track “Don’t Touch My Hair” or India Arie’s “I Am Not My Hair” for quick pop culture references. I examine both black and white aesthetics to investigate mixed race identity. On a daily basis, we all make a lot of cultural assumptions about others based on aesthetic and I aim to interrogate those assumptions.

    Blackness, whiteness, femaleness, and class are things that have been brought to the fore this election in some pretty stark and distressing ways. What effect has the current political climate had on your intersectional self-identity and the notion of “passing” that you speak about?
    Yes the current political climate makes my work feel more urgent, but issues of gender and racial equality have always been urgent. I think this election is just forcing a lot of people to confront a dark reality that so many people have always faced on a daily basis. Art has always been a tool of confrontation for me and it will continue to. As for the subject of “passing,” my blackness is built into the concept of me “passing” for white. My passing is innately black — being one thing, a person of color, but being perceived as another. This is what my photography confronts and yes, in today’s political climate, it feels pressing.

    “Smell the Roses” is on view at the California African American Museum until February 19, 2017. 

    Credits


    Text Hannah Ongley
    Images © Genevieve Gaignard and Courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

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