Gaze 7

“We are so visible we have become invisible,” writes Daphne Palasi Andreades in her book Brown Girls. To be made to feel invisible or too visible is an interesting phenomenon. It creates an urge to figure out what you really are, if there is a ‘you’ that exists beyond the perception, and it forces an empathy which may not always benefit one’s own self in the quantities that are conjured up, because you must always consider the perspective of those who “see”, or don’t “see” you. You become an observer, but also perhaps a performer.

Who is looking at whom or isn’t able to see? With what clarity? With what intent or perspective? With what stereotype in mind? How do women of colour, like me, deal with other people’s gaze? What is our own? How do we resist the gaze of others, as Toni Morrison always tried to do?

The term “double consciousness” also readily comes to mind in thinking through this, which W.E.B. Du Bois coined in the context of Black people’s experience in a white, racist society. The term can be expanded to the context of women, as Rebecca Solnit writes in her book, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir.

In speaking of that term, Solnit also refers to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, in which he writes: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself.” Simone de Beauvoir writes of men as the default, women as “the other” in her monumental book, Le Deuxième Sexe, which obviously relates to this as well.

I have been drawing girls and women with binoculars for years, because it seems to very naturally hit on the above, which I think about a lot (whether I want to or not). But, in a more mundane way, I also just happen to like the instrument, and sometimes take pictures using a camera + binoculars. This is the first time I have compiled a series to share.

14 (h) x 11 (w) inches, hand-drawing on paper. I suggest framing it as simulated, or can have it framed similarly before shipping. For purchase or interest in exhibiting, please see information here and here and get in touch.