Malisa Namsirichai Humphrey

Lives and works in Los Angeles

Artist statement

My practice examines how visual representation can support and justify systemic oppression. In particular, I am interested in the construction and depiction of race. I analyze illustrations of race that are pervasive in visual culture, looking for the genesis of culturally received ideas. Tracing the lineage of cultural ephemera that I use as source material back to conquest and imperialism, I connect present day inequity to this violent history. My work is research-based and interdisciplinary. Investigating subjects such as immigration museums, White House interior décor, 20th century European colonial expositions, Orientalist design and state sanctioned art, allows me to explore how empire and hegemony are visually expressed. These source images function as class signifiers in domestic spaces and reinforce power in state and federal buildings. I appropriate and reconfigure these images and objects, fabricating alternative iterations that become photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, video and installations. My work has screened and shown at the Armory Center for the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, the Oakland Museum of California and the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2016 I was a California Community Foundation Visual Arts Fellow. In 2018 I was the Georgia Fee Artist-in-Residence in Paris and in 2019 I was a Kala Art Institute Fellow.

Artwork