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Harmfully Decadent, 2018-2019, Video Installation, Dimensions variable, Duration 5min. 48sec.
Sound Collaboration with Nailah Middleton and fabrication assistance Adam Cowell
This video installation consists of a welded steel table, two mounted monitors, a red rug, red cushions, and a highchair with white gloves. The video presented depicts the attempt to bake and consume three pound cakes, a common southern desert, with a voice-over describing my participation in Debutante and Cotillion Balls. The voiceover is accompanied by Leslie Gore’s You Don’t Own Me and its reinterpretation by Nailah Middleton. Middleton’s cover is overlaid with my monotone recitation of Gore’s lyrics. The sound components, being variations of the same song, juxtapose a semi-melodramatic, familiar song with a somber cover to illustrate the poles of self presentation. This comparison of codes is consistent throughout the video. White gloves are complicated by pajamas, the sterility of the steel table is paired with the domesticity of a table cloth, and the infancy of the highchair is disrupted by its elongation and the addition of milk and poundcake transforming it into a dining-room table. The poundcake becomes a metaphor for the decadence of these Balls that spoils from the pain of gorging on the dense, sugary dessert. In another way, the cake conveys the sweetness and complexity of memory, cultural aesthetics, and family dynamics complicating the presumed positivity of each. The strangeness felt throughout the piece is a departure from the absurdity of the aesthetics of Debutante and Cotillion Balls which demand a level of socioeconomic status to participate. Historically, the Balls were “coming out” occasions where women of a certain race and class were presented to “society,” signaling their eligibility for marriage. Despite having less of an implication of marriage, today, these events act as indoctrination processes into racism, classism, homophobia, and sexism as the majority of women presented continue to be white and of the upper class, and “society” is determined by the same criteria.