Satisfaction not Guaranteed

2021 | organic shea butter soap, dart, wood

Art is my weapon, Minneapolis Public Library
SooVac, Minneapolis, MN

The eponymous set of four wall-mounted displays with white shea-butter casts of the statue of liberty turned dart taps into a different material history. Victorian soap ads by Pears invoked the “white man’s burden” to spread civilization and what Anne McClintock calls “imperial domesticity” around the globe in a self-imposed mission to rinse and lather color/culture from indigenous populations in a symbolic whitening rife with colonial and Orientalist connotations. The oap darts do not “guarantee satisfaction” but racialize the project of exporting liberty.