Blue Mattress, Blue Print

Blue Mattress, Blue Print (2018) is a collaboration with artist Paula Wilson at the Oxbow School of Art, Michigan.

This series is based on pinturas de casta, 18th century colonial caste paintings used as blueprints for racial discourse in Latin America. The racism that they codified is still palpable in society today. Casta paintings established a racial taxonomy of the “New World,” a hierarchy in which the Spaniards and the purity of their blood became a dominant value.

As a form of revising these paintings, we recursively performed, painted and photographed on a casta print. Through our images, the hierarchies loop on themselves. The more layers of intervention we accumulated, the more disoriented the colonial logic of this blueprint becomes.