Last night I had the great opportunity to see artists LaToya Ruby Frazier and Cauleen Smith speak about the idea of social change through art. I was so intrigued by both of their work, but I was especially captured by Frazier's story.
Frazier opened the discussion with a video clip of her and her mother seated at a table with their feet placed in a tub of water. The backdrop was cluttered, and at first I wasn't sure what they were doing or where they were at. But there was an understood silence of waiting. Then a doctor, appearing from behind the camera, placed some sort of a reading device in the tubs of water.
The doctor says reassuringly, "Don't worry, you won't get electrocuted." He then says that they can read the results from the meters placed on the table.
The clip stops.
Frazier thought it would be "interesting" to do this with her mother, as her daughter. Both Frazier and her mother were undergoing an ionic detox treatment, where toxins from the body are released through the pores of the feet, the largest pores of the body. The water is said to change different colors as the initiated electric charge applied pulls all of the toxins from the organs. An interesting experiment, Frazier continues, because my family is from Braddock, Pennsylvania.
The community of Braddock is largely African-American and is located within close proximity to a large steel mill company, better known as Edgar Thomson Steel Works which is still in operation today. Historically, African-Americans and where they could live and raise their families were limited or "red-lined" to this area. As a result, many residents suffer from a variety of ailments and diseases caused by industrial waste and pollution from the mill. Frazier's grandmother passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2009. Her mother suffers from a neurological condition, and she, lupus. What Frazier is hoping to tackle and document with her recently developed work are the many intricate layers of society's social and economic problems, as well as the impacts of environmental racism, using the relationship of her family as the backdrop. Frazier also speaks about the underdeveloped infrastructure of Braddock that is leaving many without jobs. Frazier added that Braddock's hospital was recently shut down, laying off more than 600 employees and wiping out the community's main source of medical care. She announced her future project of challenging the current Levi's Campaign
in which they advertise residents of Braddock with the overlaid slogan: "Everybody's work is equally important." She challenged, "If everybody's work is equally important, why are unemployment rates so high?"
Frazier documents the good, bad and ugly of her family all to find the beauty in her family's relationships with each other and themselves. Frazier collaborated with her mother, also an artist, to produce "Notion of the Family," a beautiful documentation of the intertwining of an individual's life in the collective commonality of space.
"The collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social document. Utilizing photography and video to navigate dynamics of the roles we play complicates the usual classifications of functional and dysfunctional families. Our work defines the lines between private and public space, emotion, reality, memory and human complexity," says Frazier.
With Frazier's provocative images of her family, we are shown another side of imperfection - beauty. Frazier ended the discussion with a thought that stuck with me: It is the imperfections that make up a person, an ideology and a country for that matter that reveal the true beauty of character.
"Notion of the Family"
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