Migrating to the Surface, 2003
Offset Lithograph
Edition of 46
21 1/2 x 30 in
Collaborative Printer: Marion Beaumont
La Vaughn Belle lives and works in the Virgin Islands, a place that has changed colonial hands seven times, most recently passing from Denmark to the United States in 1917. That history, of a land and its people repeatedly claimed, renamed, and reordered by outside forces, runs through everything she makes. Her practice spans drawing, painting, video, performance, and installation, but the medium is never the point. What she is building, in every form she works in, is a space to examine how colonial and neocolonial narratives shape identity, memory, and the stories people are allowed to tell about themselves.
Migrating to the Surface holds two versions of the same scene in tension. Across the top of the print, a photographic image of the ocean, realistic and spliced, shows a pair of feet floating at the surface of the water. Ruler markings bisect the middle of the composition, introducing the language of measurement, of bodies accounted for and quantified. Below, Belle redraws the scene in her own hand, and four stamped figures drift through those rendered waters. The doubling is deliberate. Photography and drawing, document and interpretation, the recorded and the imagined pressed against each other until the boundary between them becomes the subject. What does it mean to rise to the surface? What has been submerged, and for how long, and by whose accounting?
