Shelby Head
Providence, RI
My art practice challenges social and linguistic constructs in the United States through precisely crafted artworks organized into collections.
MessageThe living room installation transforms domestic space into a site of excavation, literally prying open the floorboards to expose a buried archive of lineage and power. The juxtaposition of a rocking chair and tea cup—symbols of home and genteel domesticity—with the unearthed documents disrupts notions of comfort and inheritance. What lies beneath is not simply family memory but a record of conquest, dispossession, and privilege: diaries, photographs, and legal papers linking Head's ancestry to the planter elite, confirming their forebears' complicity in Indigenous genocide, enslavement, and the systems of white supremacy embedded in the political and social fabric of the United States." The work implicates the very foundations—architectural, historical, and familial—upon which contemporary life rests. It refuses nostalgia, making visible the violence and inequity that underpin inherited wealth and status, forcing viewers to step carefully over a legacy that cannot be neatly covered or contained.
- Collections: An Infrastructure Of Silence, Beyond the Whitewash
Other Work From Shelby Head
© Shelby Head, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by Artwork Archive