Ken Gonzales-Day
American, 1964-

Untitled (Antico [Pier Jacobo Alari-Bonacolsi], Bust of a Young Man and Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), 2011
pigment print, ed. 2/6
17 ¾ x 46 ¾ in.

SBMA, Museum purchase
2012.6

"The collections of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, prompted me to expand the formal parameters beyond the exploration of the profile, in order to consider the origins, appearance, and uses of race as a subject of aesthetic and scientific interest." - Ken Gonzales-Day




Undated photo

COMMENTS

In this conceptually-driven photographic project, Gonzales-Day looks to the depiction of race and the construction of whiteness as points of departure from which to consider the evolution and transformation of Enlightenment ideas about freedom, class, gender, and even the location of the soul, in sculpture of the human form, the portrait bust in particular. Profiled begins after these dated ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course, but the project is as much about the present as it is the past. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these are the shadows of people who once lived in this world, or in the imaginations of their makers; they are subtle reminders of the kinds of philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual, legal, and scientific claims that once depended upon appearance alone. This project integrates these motionless — yet multivalent — forms into the complex history of racial formation. They provide a new perspective on what it means to be profiled in our own time.

- LACMA Store, Ken Gonzales-Day : Profiled
http://www.thelacmastore.org/products/ken-gonazales-day-profiled