A.Y. Johnson

The EthNic Man

Digital Media Work

“This work is directed at discussing the narrative of the western outlook on non-western, specifically African, “aesthetics”. It is a video sequence composed of a series of images of a black male with traditional African face paint as he strikes three separate poses in succession. The images were edited to look reference ‘Blackface’, which is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by performers of non-African descent to imitate the appearance of a dark-skinned person of African descent. Although the face paint is specific to Johnson’s Nigerian tribe (as there are different patterns of face paint for different tribes), it stands that the imagery of face paint on a black person majorly receives a response attributing it to a, foreign, and somehow “more ethnic” aesthetic. This work is meant to critique the imagery that is commonly associated with blacks when we speak specifically of blacks still living in Africa.© “Heaven I Know”, Gordi.”