blueground

Elia Alba grew up between New York City and the Dominican Republic, and this experience of diaspora, migration, and culture clash informs much of her practice. She shot the photographs for her 2008 series Pixies on Islamorada in the Florida Keys. In the images, young brown-skinned girls wear a uniform that consists of an orange hoodie, a flowy blue skirt, and a mask made from a low-tech printed photograph of a white woman. Like much of Alba’s photographic and sculptural work, these images are unsettling, perhaps even disturbing. These women occupy a landscape that the white western gaze would deem tropical and exotic, stereotyping its inhabitants as sensuous and untamed. The pale faces against the brown bodies creates a psychological disconnect that interrupts this narrative. “They present dual consciousness, sometimes multiple but also unattainable things,” Alba says. “All these pixies or beings are foreign but they are also foreign in their own skin.” In addition to speaking of more general desires that transcend specific contexts—for youth and beauty, for maturity and wisdom, for escape from the self and our immediate contexts—I can’t help but read a certain pointed, racial-political content in the images. If white people deny the the inhabitants of the Caribbean true agency and deny their lived reality, projecting onto them instead a racist, fetishistic ideal, then Alba’s photographs like this one here invert the dynamic. Almost in the manner of blackface, these young girls wear the “skin” of a white woman upon their faces, at once thematizing the erasure they face and using the weapon of the oppressor against itself. In the right hands, maybe whiteness itself can be used to defeat whiteness?