Ken Gonzales-Day: Profiled

Profiled considers the changing meaning of the human form and its representation. In this conceptually driven photographic project, Gonzales-Day looks to the depiction of race and construction of whiteness as points of departure from which to consider the impact of Enlightenment ideas about freedom, class, gender, and even the location of the soul, on the depiction of the human form, and the portrait bust in particular. As a project, Profiled seems to ask what comes after ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course but it is as much about the body as its inanimate double. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these lingering shadows of people that once lived in this world, or in the imaginations of their makers, have become illegible for many contemporary viewers. The project seeks to breath life back into some of these motionless forms, representing everything from memorials to Emperors and kings, to Orientalist follies, as a way of tracking changing ideas about race.