Lavar Munroe makes dense, wall-mounted assemblages that combine elements of painting, sculpture, collage, and installation. At first glance his works look abstract, but gradually the textile scraps and other cobbled-together materials coalesce into images of man and beast acting out scenes of subjugation and rebellion. Here, an alien-like creature stands over the body of a prostrate, gender-ambiguous human; the beast is chained to some sort of uniformed guard, thus complicating our ability to determine the power dynamics at play. The work forms part of a series Munroe created in an attempt to reclaim the vicious stereotypes thrust upon him when he left his native Bahamas to study. “Upon entry into the American school system, words such as exotic, islander and native became the norm when many Americans referred to me,” he says. “These words were usually followed by bizarre questions regarding the way of life on the ‘islands’, which usually pointed to ideals that referenced behaviors of the savage.” His research into the origins of these derogatory clichés led him to study the history of anthropological displays of “third world” people in Western cultural contexts, practices that treated the “other” as spectacle and inherently subhuman. “Through the manipulation of imagery sourced from ethnologic illustrations, advertisements, and sideshow banners, I create an ‘elsewhere’ that examines narratives, exhibits and fascinations that resulted from such displays,” he describes. “In much of the work, the exotic human ‘other’ is often paired alongside wild beasts, thus referencing the systematic representation of human difference that occurred during the phenomena of the ‘human zoo’.” Through destructive techniques of cutting and tearing, and a bricolage that reunites the disjointed elements, Munroe parallels the project of examining these violent racist histories and reconfiguring them in order to move forward.
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