‘Useable Several Times’ is practice-based research that focuses on 20th century western visual culture, specifically the racist practice of illustrating and animating anti-black tropes/characters.
This practice-based research uses a post-structuralist semiotic framework, specifically the semiotics of difference and the semiotic ‘other’. I have always used Stuart Hall’s observation of ‘transcoding through the eye of representation’ interchangeably with ‘reappropriation’ to disarticulate racist ephemera as a black artist and researcher of the arts. Hall’s ‘Constituting an Archive’ (2001) is also crucial to my disarticulation of archives and archival. ‘Constituting an Archive’ has also been extremely vital to framing ‘Useable Several Times’ as an always ongoing archive-in-progress and decolonizing what it means to ‘collect’, ‘preserve’, and ‘archive’.
Utilizing my stitching/embroidery practice, I subvert some of my archive findings and reappropriate them to reflect their true nature as disturbing images. My alteration process involves tracing the original image but changing the faces of the figures to reflect a more overt line between cuteness and grotesqueness while leaving the surrounding imagery and text unchanged. I deploy an Afrosurreal aesthetic by making the figures appear more alien/unreal with strange pupils and wide smiles with too many teeth.
I also record ‘amplified stitchings’ of each embroidery during the stitching process. These recordings are conducted using contact or instrument amplifying microphones attached to the embroidery hoop and my hands to amplify the ‘hidden’ sound of stitching to rearticulate the practice as radical and disruptive versus the common idea of stitching/sewing being a quiet, docile, invisible act. As sonic disruption, stitching gestures produce sounds of scratching, growling, rustling, and puncture.