Kimberlee Cordova

Once while lost and alone in Cambodia I met two girls who introduced themselves to me as ‘Circle’ and ‘Cloudybongwater’. Meeting these outrageous characters I realized that the lack of biographical context when traveling provides tremendous freedom for self-reinvention, but the price of this freedom is the room it allows for others to project preconceived notions onto the decontextualized other. It became clear to me that what a person decides to be is only part of who they are…a person is also, maybe far more so, what others perceive them as.

But what if I hate what is being projected on me? And what if I hate it, but it’s true, and there is nothing I can do about that? Enter my post-post-colonial guilt complex and the beginning of a struggle with what it means to be, and to not necessarily identify with all that it means to be ‘American’.

My interest in the tension between what ‘I think I am’ versus ‘what others make me to be’ finds fruition in the exchange of different kinds of gazes and returned gazes of the people in my paintings. The people in the paintings who recognize the presence of the viewer include the viewer in a painted web of awarenesses and gazes between people who are aware they are being looked at, those who are unaware, and those who “know you know they know they are being watched”.

My paintings are inspired by the time I spent living in Southeast Asia, but they are motivated by my post-post-colonial guilt complex that comes from being caught between an awareness that I am privileged to be well-educated and living in a first-world country, and guilty resignation that though I loath the politics of being an “American”, I enjoy the life style perks of being one as well.