Framing the OtherFraming the Other(2015-16)

The digital montages made for under the working title Framing the Other are portraits, made by digitally painting one source into another. This process replicates the conceptual center of the work. The sources are on the one hand paintings, taken from the canon of European royalty tradition (1450-1750) and on the other, selections from the Indian Gallery by George Caitlin. The resulting portraits intentionally conflate historical chronology in an effort to externalize the exploitative ideology that results in the creation of the Indian Gallery. The American West is the furthest one can travel from the historical seat of power – Western Europe, and as such contained its own sense of otherness – those native to the west were therefore treated as otherworldly.

 
The European Royals, whose will toward colonialism ultimately framed the other in the image of Native Americans, arrogantly assumed rights to land well beyond the propriety of their inherited positions. Of course, it is the force of capital that created such a drive towards acquisition (of land), and was justified wholly by the rigid adherence to the functionaries of religious conversion: missionaries were the ruse through which Royal figures enacted colonialism. We have seen religion used throughout history to justify violence and capitalistic pursuit. These works are planned to include the use of empty baroque or rococo frames, ill fitting and therefore redolent of the status of the multivariate notion of the frame.