I feel like the work still needs some honing in.

When I have titles like "Guardians" and "Support System", I fear there is room for a lot of confusion. So I'm changing it from "Guardians" to "Inheritance". "Guardians" implies that I myself I'm guarding my status. "Inheritance" instead makes what I have into a phenomenon, instead of a status I protect.

I originally made a few pieces which looked at the concept of white male privilege sardonically, as if in a purely objective, postmodern way. But the thing I dislike about postmodernism is it's passivity. It's always in a state of looking. It's cynical, separatist, and looking down from an elevated, intellectual, and ultimately, classist standpoint. It's an elite form of laughing at the class.

So, I would like to draw this distinction from now on, since I lost myself. I was aware that I wanted to avoid postmodernist approaches, but I still succumbed to it. In this conceptual context, it is totally offensive.

My work is about self-discovery and healing. It's about understanding my universe. It's about tapping deep into my psyche. The piece I originally called Guardians, but now is titled "Inheritance", is about this caste, and how it feels to think about it in objective terms. And quite honestly, it is an overwhelming feeling of anxiety. The figures are biting their nails and wondering why they are positioned in this weird hierarchical space. This is what my work is about.

So, moving forward, again, the work needs to be completely about me, this one person in this one body. It is not about speaking in an overarching, generalized way about the demographic I belong to. But I am in fact addressing what I am and the ancillary effects of belonging to this demographic. It's about self-questioning.

What is the overarching hope for this work? To activate a conversation of self-questioning in an arena rarely challenged in this fashion. The problem with a lot of this race, gender, and class theory discussing white men is it is 95% told from the vantage point of someone oppressed by them. It remains more of a concept as long as the white men discussed remain passive viewers/listeners of this discussion. Action is necessary from the white men to bring the concept into real-time in order to deconstruct it. The point of the work is to give a voyeuristic safe space to observe a subject questioning himself in ways not typically enacted.

Aside from the hope in pushing an on button within a white male faction, I would hope this work is interesting as a case study in racial constructs, amongst other institutional and social constructs.

Although I am very interested in being aware of the image of the white man as is defined in the concepts discussed in much of this theory, I am more interested in bringing it down to earth in my encounter with it.

So there is one image in which I am flexing my arm. I have a beard, it is a profile, and it's a very aggressive image. It borders on satire. It's meant to be an allusion to the myth of meritocracy, that is, hard work alone (arm power) leads to success (strength). But what is missing from this image is a sense of insecurity in knowing this is false, but the complexity of being obliged to believe it due to the experience of not perceiving certain head starts or generational reserves of wealth which aid in "achievement". In other words, how do I represent the whiff of sensing the lie but struggling to come to grips with a lie which has served me? It's very complex. The piece needs to channel this.

And so on...