Inquiry

How is perception relational? How are colour’s cultural, poetic, and political meanings taken up by the artists who work with it? When colour is used immersively, what can its psychological and embodied effects tell us about the spaces we inhabit (and the structures of containment that employ colour for the purposes of psychological manipulation)? How is colour coded as racialized or queer? When and how is colour politicized or de-politicized? Human perception of colour takes on many connotations throughout Blackwood projects that explore these questions: from colour’s role in data visualization and information systems; to the mobilization of colour in protest movements; to the power of optics to produce effects and distortions that call the foundations of perception into question. Colour’s relationship to classification systems and taxonomies is extensive: whether historical (as in the ethnographer’s white-supremacist classification of human skin tones) or contemporary (as in the insidious presence of colourism in the ongoing categorization and tokenization of people based on race and ethnic background). In approaching these questions, artists and researchers also incite us to ask: how might a serious consideration of colour confront the monolith of whiteness? And what do we make of the invisible spectra of colours and perceptual experiences that go unseen and un-coded?