damali ayo YARN

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YARN: Exploring Competing American Narrative please browse photos while animations load. this may take a while. click on any photo to enlarge. animations will play in succession: golliwogg's cakewalk, dueling banjos, ten little indians, china girl

			YARN animations *golliwogg's cakewalk, dueling banjos,* *ten little indians, china girl*


	the YARN stills above and other images are available for purchase. 8x10 matte photo print, framed $150, unframed $75 contact sales@damaliayo.com
		“Yarn” is an exhibition of four animated short videos and twelve animation stills designed to explore the tension between racial narrative and national identity. In its vernacular use, the word “yarn” means a long or involved tale, especially one that relates exciting or incredible events, as in, “Listen closely when she talks, because your grandmother can really spin some yarn.” Under this umbrella of narrative, “Yarn” explores both individual racial narratives and a shared narrative of national identity. In its textile definition, a strand of yarn is made of several thinner strands twisted together. When examining a strand of yarn, each sub-strand can be seen and sometimes even extracted from the larger thread, much like the narratives that comprise multi-racial nations. “Yarn” uses narrative to examine the threads that tie us together as a nation through presenting the seemingly disparate narratives that formulate the racial and ethnic identities present in the United States. “Yarn” seeks to do this by offering a series of animations whose central characters represent four different racial identities, Black, White, Asian American, and Native American. The animation stills add Latino/a and Arab American identities to this collection. Initially, “Yarn” may appear as a linear stream of singular racial narratives. The exhibition asks viewers to interpret the animated tales as they recall and interpret their own tales of the racial identities they ascribe to themselves and others. As the viewer becomes more involved, “Yarn” twists these tales together through similar imagery, universal narrative, compelling protagonists, and strategies of dissonance and exclusion. This allows for an interrogation of the symbolism, experiences and icons that weave us together as a population that shares a national identity. Through this presentation of narratives, “Yarn” poses a series of questions. If national identity is formulated (partially) through a sense of shared narrative, then do multiracial nations face the dilemma of competing narratives? Who lays claim to the national identity and how does race and ethnicity affect our relationship to the narrative of our nation? How is race and ethnicity used to include or exclude people from this narrative and resultantly, the national identity? Furthermore, the stereotyped nature of the images opens viewers to questions of authorship, authenticity, voice, stereotype and proxy. Do the narratives presented reflect the represented group’s experience in the mind of the viewer? Are we in charge of our own cultural representations? What happens when we are not? How do we represent the experiences of those inside and outside of our own racial group? Whose tale do we accept as truth and whose do we claim is falsified? What does it mean to share a national identity even as we maintain separate racial narratives? Can we discover the natural fibers that weave us together as a nation or must we fabricate synthetic commonalities out of a political need for national unity?