A Life to Those Shadows (2015-17) was shown at SUNY-Binghamton, in the Elsie B. Rosefsky Memorial Art Gallery from March 30 – April 27, 2017, and curated by Hans Gindlesberger, Associate Professor of Photography. This is a series of real and invented portraits that critically reconstruct, and attempt to create Dutch-Indonesian ethnic personas that capture the present through the historical, trans-generational experience. The portraits embody the expansion of identity through the specific colonization of the Dutch East Indies. Here the problems were exacerbated by race and caste distinctions, as seen through the tainted lens of the ‘other’. Colonization, produced misrepresentation, propaganda mirroring the current global existential crises of war, ethnic violence, refugees, and mass migration. As a first generation American of Indische (Dutch-Indonesian) heritage, I find it unsettling that the diasporic Indische ethnicity is rapidly disappearing in the 21st century, especially in the Indische diaspora outside the Netherlands. The distinctive ethnicity came about when the first Dutch traders arrived on the banks of Java in 1603. The portraits are an imaginary genetic timeline of speculative Javanese ancestry through the process of visual invention; each face becomes a mask and an enigmatic labyrinth of shifting facial features. My obsessive remaking of the same or similar faces explores the pictorial paradoxes of how memory and the imaginary develop their own authentic forms of speculative realism. The faces reflect malleable, changeable, yet unknowable times, spaces, and narratives. Many Indische identified themselves as being Dutch; some had fought in the Netherlands Royal Military against Japanese forces during WWII. After the Indonesian War for Independence (1945-49) the Indische population was urged, then forced to migrate and ‘repatriate’ in Holland, a country most of them had never seen.
