Mailed to Héléne Lagache.

Most of the portraits that I draw are inspired by a bunch of images that I salvaged from an encyclopedia that my great aunt was going to throw out. I love the way that the portraits are used to mythologize people - the cock of their head and the glint in their eyes are meant to make them look grandiose and memorable.

Of all the images that I tore out the books, the vast majority are old, white men. There are a handful of women, and almost no people of colour. Or - in some ways even worse - the few images of people of colour are meant to be merely ethnographic, and don't bother to identify the people in the images. It really bothered me that an encyclopedia - which is devoted to canonizing people by identifying them and placing them in a historical context - would dismiss whole swaths of people as not deserving of being named and identified.

Normally I don't identify the people in my portraits. I am more interested in their appearance than I am their identity. But in this case, I felt the need to hilight the racism that underlied the decision not to identify this man in my image source.

Mailed from Montreal, Quebec.