Ashley Waithe

The Fantasy Of Light

The Fantasy of Light explores Du Bois’s Theories of Double Consciousness in contrast with J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan to investigate the experience of what it means to grow up as a black child in a White supremacist world. I wanted to question who gets to live in the fantasy of youth in Western post-colonial society. What can it look like to find a place where that power and youth come from? Can we merge the dual sense of self? For this work, I created a single-channel video with a run time of 5 minutes and 4 seconds. I played with shadow and light, using a dark room and flashlight positioning myself as the shadow. Alongside filmed footage is also found footage of Disney’s 1953 Peter Pan, which has been distorted and changed. Influences I have had for this project range from the writers of the text themselves but also to contemporary black artists. I specifically looked at Ulysses Jenkins, a video artist from the 70s-the early 2000s. His influence can be seen in my work as I used his methods of found footage combined with made footage to have a dialogue between the two times and two worlds. Within my work, I explore what it means to grow up as a black child in a white-centered world, I dance between light and shadow. My figure flirts but also moves away from the light. Constantly being caught within it but not encompassed by it. For me, this explores this sense of being othered by whiteness but also standing out further because of it. My use of childhood photos that get increasing distortion reflects how that childhood was never really one. From an early age, you get a sense you are different and as you progress, it gets more distorted as to why.