I appear in space with a sculpture (Façade 1) designed to imitate the clapboard exterior of a New England colonial house. The clapboards are painted with one quart of Nearly Brown (SW 9093) as a base coat, and one gallon of Core White (HGSW4051) as a top coat. Over long durations, I sand through the white paint to reveal the brown paint underneath. The performance will end when all of the white paint is removed from the sculpture.

“To the Bone” uses household paint collected from Sherwin-Williams (whose names echo deeply entrenched racist ideas about color) as layers to be excavated and decolonized. Through performance, I use the simple act of sanding through layers of paint to position color, identity, and home at the border of Interior and Exterior as a site to contemplate erasure and reclamation under white supremacy.

In my more recent performances, in Pittsburgh and in North Adams, I have enlisted white accomplices to take over the labor of sanding for me in a reversal of Tom Sawyer’s whitewashing the fence.

Façade 1 was sanded for 18 hours during performances of “To the Bone” in 2017.