My Name Is Maria, Too
2023
Skin whitening soap
Multiple Virgin Mary statues made with skin-whitening soap, presented neatly in a row, is a way to convey the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate aspects of whiteness and the colonial enterprise. I have been interested in how religion has shaped ideas of race and gender and was used as a means of quelling the imagined wildness of native populations. Especially for former Spanish colonies like the Philippines still practicing Catholicism, ideas of piety and virginal purity are perpetuated through the reverence of the Virgin Mary.