Culture, Identity & the Visual Arts: Who Am I? [ page 2 ]

These are drawings done by me as a young woman attempting to come to terms with my sexuality. It is worth noting here the title of the series, Dark Horse/Black Sheep, both expressions referring to the unexpected or to a deviation from accepted standards. I was raised and educated as a catholic, and as an adult I am acutely aware of organized religion’s influence on cultural norms. The church taught that heterosexuality was the only acceptable sexuality, and that a woman’s sexuality was grounded not in pleasure but in procreation. The church also taught that homosexuality and lesbianism were unspeakable abominations that led directly to the infernos of hell, equal in sinfulness to the most serious infractions against God’s law. As a child with an acute sense of my difference, the church did nothing to assure me of my basic goodness, and I understood at an early age that an essential aspect of my developing identity was considered unacceptable.

I grew up in a dysfunctional home where racial slurs and derogatory references to dykes and faggots and queers were not uncommon. I was assumed to be heterosexual by both my family and my social/cultural sphere. Heterosexual doctrine defined my future identity as a wife, a homemaker, and a mother. But the Dark Horse/Black Sheep drawings spoke of a different personal reality, of sexual and personal identity at odds with every traditional gender-based paradigm I had ever been exposed to. My inner and outer worlds were in great conflict.

The years following my graduate school experience were a time of escalating self-doubt and uncertainty…a time of trying to find my place in the world on a personal level. I was newly but securely positioned in academia, having been hired into a tenure-track position at a university in the great northern plains. On a personal level, however, I was searching for affirmation and a sense of community. I was lacking a sense of belonging and examining my family and social history and its impact on my sense of self. I was an intelligent woman, but I was making choices that reflected and repeated childhood experiences of loss and longing, disapproval and dysfunction, anxiety and fear, submission and silence. This process of self-examination and self-revelation was made even more difficult by the still pervasive cultural attitudes that encourage silence and secretiveness around the family and cultural taboos. It was understood that loyalty to one’s family required silence, even as it bred internalized shame and a distorted notion of what is normal. As I moved further into adulthood, my subconscious voice was no longer willing to be silent, speaking to me through dreams, memories, and visions. It was perhaps inevitable that this voice emerged in my work in a series titled Visions, Dreams, and Memories.

In this series, I use my visions, dreams and memories as an uncensored source of information, and as a vital link to the integrity of the unconscious mind. The very nature of the unconscious mind as a vessel for that which the conscious mind suppresses suggests the frequently dark nature of secrets held there. Believing in the universality of human experience and the human condition, I strive to convey a moment of thought, of fear, of need, of vulnerability, of dark recognition...a moment of truth that transcends the personal and acknowledges the depth of human experience at both a conscious and unconscious level.