Health and beauty aids are things we bring into our homes, put on our skin, and use in our daily routines voluntarily. We encounter office supplies in a myriad of ways, and even in the most impersonal institutional setting, they come in contact with intimate details of our being.
As mass-produced commodities, these materials also maintain a connection to global capitalism, reminding us that we are part of a bigger picture of structural oppression. This awareness can be an entry point into a conversation about race.
I’m increasingly turning to autobiography in my art-making, spurred on by a question posed by antiracist organizers at a meeting I attended:
“When did your family become white?” I obtained some of the materials for these artworks during my first visit to Canada in the spring of 2017, as I pondered my French Canadian ancestry, which I know little about since my maternal grandmother died when my mother was two years old. I even found an academic article titled How French Canadians became White Folks, or doing things with race in Quebec during that trip.
This deconstructing of whiteness gives me hope.
- Suzanne Broughel
