Ken Gonzales-Day

Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River (1993-1996; 2017) was created as an artistic response to the heated debates that raged in the late 1980s and early 90s around AIDS, gay and transgender rights, immigration and the border, and multiculturalism - and directly addressed mixed racial identity-at a time when the work by Latinx artists were rarely exhibited or written about. This significant body of work established Gonzales-Day's interest in uncovering missing histories in what can now be seen as his unique use of historical research, and it laid the groundwork for his future projects that include Searching for California Hang Trees, Erased Lynchings, and Profiled.

Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River is a conceptually driven photographic project that manifests itself in two ways: first, as a literary trope of the frontier novel of the late nineteenth century and, second, as a digitally constructed artifact whose material existence stood in for the historical absence of such texts. Not surprisingly, such novels often depicted Native and Latino inhabitants as ridiculous personages encountered on an otherwise naturalized conquest of the West. Bone-Grass Boy is their nemesis. 

Set during the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48), a period that saw bitter struggles between cultures and brought within the control of the United States the future states of Texas, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona, the work depicts the effects of the annexation on two main protagonists. Ramoncita is a Native/Latina "two-spirit person" who, the reader learns, is forced to kill the rancher to whom she has been indentured. Nepomuceno, a New Mexican soldier, fights on the Mexican side, only to have to sneak back to his homeland, now an American territory. In the tradition of self-portraiture and theatrical role-playing in art, Gonzales-Day assumes the role of all of the characters in the photographs.

Campy and melancholic, Bone-Grass Boy makes use of new technologies of the day (Photoshop 2.5 and Quark) in an attempt to construct what might be thought of as a fictitious "nevermade." The work creates dialogue with Marcel Duchamp's now archetypal readymades such as Fountain (1917), a signed urinal that was initially rejected for its conceptual illegibility. The reversal of the readymade - that is to say, the creation of an object that was never made, but that is given the appearance of a historical document - offers a subtle and humorous critique of the avant-garde appropriation of the everyday object, which, it could be argued, made use of objects that, at the most basic level, retained the historical and material privileges of Western culture. Because of the opacity of cultural difference embodied within the images