These images depict two figures surrounded by trademark symbols. The smaller figure is my grandfather, my Jiddo, pictured in Lebanon where he grew up, holding a fish from a dive. One of his favorite pastimes on the Mediterranean.
Behind him is a larger, shrouded figure: a celebrity dressed as a terrorist for Halloween in the early 2000s. An image that, through xenophobic rhetoric and mass media, was pushed upon Middle Easterners in America and more broadly in the West.
The trademark symbols represent ownership. This racist and overplayed stereotype was placed upon men like myself and my grandfather without our permission. We were trademarked.
Each image is screen printed. I use purple for my Jiddo, a historically royal color and his favorite, while the figure behind him is printed in black, shrouding that royalness in darkness. In the second image, I reverse this relationship, using black for my Jiddo and pink for the larger figure to emasculate it and allow my Jiddo to stand out.
Together, the works present the same reality through two truths: the dilution of the self under racist imagery, and its opposite, the persistence of true self and personality despite it. As a mixed race boy, I have lived between these truths, as my grandfather did in America as well.
