Imprint—After the Age of Discovery is a set of photolithographs printed at the Tamarind Institute and housed in white oak with pigskin. It explores an intimate geography—a map of the palm of my hand. A shift in scale and context make the information diagnostic of my own unique body refer instead to larger shared land spaces. Our largest organ, skin forms a membrane that defines the conventional boundary of where we end and the rest of the world begins. Skin is the ultimate ‘medium’, or go-between, a primal intermediary of personal expression.
Though we consider our bodies autonomous places—perhaps the only sites we ever own—this autonomy is complicated by a body’s presence within a culture. The body is wrapped in representation, just as land becomes landscape. We are described, restricted, and sometimes even destroyed by our cultures and States.
I appropriated graphics from maps of the New World to explore my figure as a site tied to the history of territorial claims and conquest.
