Still Dreams

This week many things have occurred that have made me look at my current project differently. When I stated my still lives, I knew how I wanted them to look, and how I generally wanted them to read. While they were each supposed to be their own significant story they started getting jumbled in one another, and it became frustrating that they lost the elements I wanted them to have.  I started looking at more examples of visual dreams, memories, etc. and decided to go with what was in my head. I got the recommendation to look at Arthur Tress’ images in The Dream Collector and my whole mindset on how to portray my dreams changed.

I stated to look at more of reenactments, stage scenarios, and movie stills. When I started making my still lives, I was basing the objects off of the objects that had symbolic meanings for dreams, which combined both fiction and non-fiction scenarios for possible dreams someone may experience. Now I want to solely focus on my own dreams and nightmares by making scenes that reflect my moments of  unconscious.  I am hoping my new approach is a step in the right direction so that I can narrow down on how I want to portray my dreams, while making them interestingly enough to get lost in.

Another highlighting moment this week was finding a clip online from the Arsenio Hall night show. It featured a woman by the name of Ernestine giving a short speech, very poetically describing the average black woman. Her words gave me comfort because for so long I have known the struggle of “sounding white.” For sometime when I was younger I felt ashamed that I didn’t sound black enough, but I didn’t know what sounding black was.  I got picked on from black people for being proper, and praised by other races for sounding intelligent “for a black girl”. It honestly was a very confusing ordeal.  Just something I thought I would share for people who may have never experienced this. Click here for the link-Average Black Girl

Colorism

Light Girls Documentary - Click the link to watch Light Girls Documentary

Earlier this week the second part of the documentary Dark Girls came out. It was titled Light Girls, and it traveled through the history of lighter skin black women, the stereotypes, our standards of beauty, and the struggles of growing up a light skin woman. I found this documentary uncovering another part of my identity, because being an African American woman I never put myself in the category of light or dark skin. I just know that I am mixed with a variety of things; I didn’t know I would be a brown skinned girl, like everyone else we are the product of who made us.

 What if you were made by a slave master and a slave, you didn’t ask to be put here, but now you don’t fit anywhere. You can’t be white because you have black in your blood, but you aren’t fully black either.  I find it interesting to learn about the specific struggles lighter skinned women faced in the past. If you passed for white, you had the option to live a better life not having to worry about being killed or treated unfairly. But what if your parents were darker, your sister, or your brother? I think its interesting to wonder how many people from my parents generation don’t know they are black, because their parents married light to make sure they could live. You can’t have a relationship with your old family if you decide to live passing as white. Giving up your life to live is something I would find unbearable to do, but I do understand the objective was to live.

This documentary also made me think about the standards of beauty for African American women. What and who do we look to, because in the world we live in the lighter woman is always more glorified. But then you hear lighter women saying how they want to darken their skin, how they were called names like banana, vanilla, etc. The reverse is we have dark women wanting to bleach their skin to be lighter. We are always trying to find something to fix, something to improve, instead of just learning to be beautiful. These thoughts baffle me because being light or dark shouldn’t be a problem, and it shouldn’t define who is more beautiful or acceptable to the world. Stemming from this old beliefs we still have people put themselves on defense of one another because we label them as not looking black enough, or too black, and even going as far and saying you don’t sound black. I remember being picked on when I would go to Louisiana by my cousins, because I didn’t sound like a black girl, I was what they called a red bone, etc. Why as people do we have to find a way to discredit someone else to feel better about ourselves? We are all made up of the same cells, and when we die we will all rot the same way too.

Making my Dreams Surreal!

I am very happy to have heard Beth Lily speak about how her projects have developed over time, and how it’s a trail and error process. I think it is true that it can take years to get results, and to figure out why you want or need to do something.  I didn’t think that I needed to express some of the things that haunt me on a daily basis, but I am learning that sometimes it’s necessary. This past week, I watched probably 10 minutes of news, and went to sleep to a terrifying dream Wednesday night. This was a new one of many similar recurring nightmares I have been experiencing since I was 10. I don’t know why these dreams are recurring other than it being in my subconscious. This particular dream was different than most of my usual ones. It involved witnessing and being a hostage to a terror attack, trying to contact my family without any luck, and being alone trying to defend myself with weapons I didn’t remember how to load. I knew these events weren’t real, but in my deep sleep every scenario was a tense visual reality.

This has me searching for a way to visually cast these scenarios out of my conscious to hopefully end these nightmares. I have been looking into surreal photography, and have found a few artists who styles have peaked my interest. Terra Kate is the one I have been drawn to the most out of all the ones I have found online. I can actually relate more to the depicted realities in her images, than I would have if I saw them a year ago based on my experiences.  I am interested in the dream like state, and how I could possible represent my trails into something surreal.

 Online I found an article about dream interpretation and it stated that there are 4 categories of dreams: Precognitive, Warning, Factual, and Inspirational. I think this approach will help me find a way to understand which categories my dreams fall into, and how to visually represent their abstract qualities visually.

Army Brat Life

In 2012 there was a flood at my parents home in Louisiana, where a lot of my belongings were water damaged. Last week while I was home I started organizing more of the storage containers in my room. I found some souvenirs along with 3 letters that were written back in 2003 to my father and uncle who were deployed in Iraq. It bought back a lot of memories, and I started thinking about who I was then, and who I have become now.

Looking at these letters instantly bought back tears I couldn’t fight. These little souvenirs have shaped some part of my identity, and play a large roll in the anxiety I continue to carry from being that ten-year old girl. I can still see that little girl who can’t stand to watch the news because of the fear to recognize a name on the screen. There are many untold stories that I am just now learning to remove the shield away from. One thing that still haunts me even now being almost 23 is the recurring dreams about terror.

Now that there had been attacks in Paris this past week, it’s bringing back up the dreams I started to have when I was younger. That is the reason why I can’t watch the news, as much as it is supposed to keep you informed it keeps me scared because I feel like they only tell you the negative things. It makes me nervous to think that my friends now will have to go to another place to fight. I have always been that girl, no matter how old I get, I can’t run from the fears I’ve developed from being a Brat, and that’s the scariest part. While I am happy I found my letters, I wasn’t expecting them to bring so much worry back into my mind.