Art Work from Alex Jove

"Reframing Reality"

Medium: Oil Paint
Size: 6in x 10in
Substrate: Panel
Status: Available
Year: 2022

Mixed Identity

Medium: Oil Paint
Size: 10in x 8in
Substrate: Panel
Status: Available
Year: 2022

This piece is about my personal experience with race and identity. When you talk to anyone who is mixed race or not white in the US about their relationship with their racial identity, their story will be different.

In this piece, I have half of my face painted white. This is because of how I view myself in my mind. Ever since I was a kid, my inner self was painted white. I knew I was brown, but my inner identity was painted from the town I grew up in. My sibling and I were the only brown children I knew of for many years until middle school. As time passed and I grew older, I never thought about how I navigated the world or how the framework of my mind was constructed until my late 20's. I was rarely exposed to the culture of my ethnic roots in my youth and it never played a major part of my development. My mind was molded in small town white America.

I left half of my face unpainted because I am a brown man. I was never ashamed of my skin color, but it was the source of a lot pain due to the racism I experienced in my childhood. I didn't understand it so much as a child, other than it made me hated and a target from children and adults alike. School was a very traumatic environment. Elementary, middle school, and high school were the roughest times of my life and I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone. Being passive and quiet in adversity was the survival strategy that worked best and this learned behavior is something I am uncoding as an adult today. I am bummed that this is how things are, but we are all dealt a hand when we are born and I am working with the one I was dealt with. Being a brown child when 9/11 happened made it so much worse. Racist behaviors in the students, their parents and other adults around me were emboldened and I was the target for their assaults. I can say I was fortunate that I wasn't physically attacked often. The attacks on my psyche was an every day struggle and I believe that is what caused the most damage that I am healing from today. I was scared and upset most of my youth, a byproduct of being brown in a small white town.

I am a work in progress, and this isn't a story where I can say I was made stronger because of the adversity I faced. I am a broken person who is trying damn hard to make life enjoyable. I still harbor some resentment to the individuals who were cruel to me growing up, though now I have an idea of how humans acquire their behaviors. Understanding that makes it easier for me to navigate the world and lets me see how these cycles of pain get passed down. The US has a lot of improvement to do when it comes to racism, but I want to acknowledge there has been some progress made in my lifetime. I am a victim of racism, but I don't want to live as a victim.

Coming to terms with my identity is new for me and something I feel is foundational in my development going forward. My mind is one born from middle America and my ethnic heritage is from a culture I can't relate to. When it comes to a sense of belonging, I feel fairly lost. I think all I can do is work to be a good human and that is a measure I plan to live by.

This painting represents these feelings, it is an expression that represents my relationship with my racial identity.