Ken Gonzales-Day

In this conceptually-driven photographic project, Profiled by Ken Gonzales-Day looks to the depiction of race and the construction of whiteness as points of departure from which to consider the evolution and transformation of Enlightenment ideas about freedom, class, gender, and even the location of the soul, in sculpture of the human form, the portrait bust in particular. Profiled begins after these dated ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course, but the project is as much about the present as it is the past. Cast, carved, burned, and broken, these are the shadows of people who once lived in this world, or in the imaginations of their makers; they are subtle reminders of the kinds of philosophical, metaphysical, spiritual, legal, and scientific claims that once depended upon appearance alone. This project integrates these motionless—yet multivalent—forms into the complex history of racial formation. Encompassing everything from memorials of emperors and kings to gods and goddesses, Orientalist follies, and racial typologies, together they provide a new perspective on what it means to be profiled in our own time.