ANTIQUE PRINT RE-MIX

Maria Dumlao & Suchitra Mattai

by heather moqtaderi Founder & Artistic Director, Past Present Projects

Past Present Projects brings together contemporary art with historic spaces and artifacts. We are a non-profit based in Philadelphia, where we organize site-responsive exhibitions and publish a bi-annual journal, Past Present. The artists Maria Dumlao and Suchitra Mattai are interviewed in Past Present Issue no. 2.

Before the invention of photography, printed books and journals disseminated global culture and natural history to western audiences. From fashion to fauna, antique print “plates” are embedded with political charge. Even the most seemingly innocuous images are often implicated in the history of western colonialism. While an early 19th century aquatint of a pineapple, for example, wasn’t printed explicitly to promote western imperialism, it connects to a broader history of displacing native people from their land. This article explores the work of two contemporary artists who adapt and interrogate antique British and French prints to unravel colonial histories.

Suchitra Mattai is a contemporary artist who seeks to “expand our sense of history” through her interdisciplinary artistic practice. She incorporates found objects that connect to her multi-layered Indo-Caribbean identity, such as vintage saris and ghungroo bells, along with materials that reflect the broader framework of western colonialism, like European prints. The Past is Present is a smallscale artwork that began as an antique fashion plate by the Ukrainian-French illustrator Adele-Anaïs Toudouze for the French magazine La Mode Illustrée. The original print expresses the 19th century European taste for goods sourced from colonial territories, such as the textile draped across an armchair, a long-necked bottle resting on the pier table, and a houseplant native to tropical climates. It is an image intended to convey fashionable taste, centered on two French women conversing in a parlor. This is a spellbinding image of not only fashion but domestic comfort. (Peeking from the seated woman’s skirt, notice a dainty coral slipper resting on a cushion!)

The fashion plate suggests a picture-perfect world, and yet we know that French and English taste for non-western design was linked to the subjugation of people on the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. Mattai’s own ancestors were among those in 19th-century British-ruled India who essentially had no choice but to cross the sea and live as indentured laborers in Guyana. The system of indentured servitude on sugar plantations fueled the French and British economies, as well as western taste for sweets and non-western design. Mattai contends with this disjuncture – between the elegant tableau in La Mode Illustrée and its underlying colonial context – through manipulating the print. She quite literally disrupts the illusion of serenity by cutting and stitching into the image. She “shatters” the pier glass and window with her scissors. Laser beam-like colored threads seem to project from the standing woman’s eyes, piercing through her companion and the walls of the room, as well as the illusion of the picture-perfect scene.

In another series, Mattai creates mixed media collages using plates from a 19th century design book. British designer and educator Owen Jones published Grammar of Ornament in 1856 as a compendium of patterns and design motifs from around the world. Mattai uses pages from a 20th century edition as the foundation for new artworks that tell her story. The chapters of Grammar of Ornament are divided by cultures, and Mattai selected Plate XLIX from the chapter on Indian design for Bittersweet. Owen Jones felt that Indian design was superior to British design, and looked to patterns on Indian goods for inspiration. Jones remarked that the designs from this plate were mostly derived from silver huqqa bases. He viewed many of these huqqa designs at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and wrote that they were “all remarkable for elegance of outline, and for such a judicious treatment of the surface decoration that every ornament tended to farther develope [sic] the general form.”

In Grammar of Ornament, Jones compartmentalizes cultures throughout the world into tidy little boxes. The text throughout the book contextualizes – patronizingly – global design as the result of successive cultural take-overs. In the Indian chapter, he writes: “The Tunisian still retaining the art of the Moors, who created the Alhambra; the Turk exhibiting the same art, but modified by the character of the mixed population over which they rule; the Indian uniting the severe forms of Arabian art with the graces of Persian refinement.” In Bittersweet, Mattai challenges this compartmentalization by hand painting a female character over the huqqa patterns that attempt to pin down Indian identity. Her long braid extends to the bottom of the page, where it becomes a snake, connecting to Hindu mythology of the naga. She describes this female character as “tender and vulnerable but also strong.” Despite the fact that she is turned away from us, we feel her as a person – an individual who doesn’t conform to a cultural stereotype. Mattai describes her own relationship with Indian culture as complicated. The loss of language among Indian communities who came to Guyana as indentured servants has forever fractured Indo-Caribbean relationships with Indian culture.

Cultural fracturing and displacement are key themes in addressing the global history of colonialism, and Mattai’s approach directly interrogates period imagery. Maria Dumlao is an interdisciplinary artist who likewise addresses colonial histories through archival print sources. Rather than manipulating original prints, Dumlao blends digitized archival images within layered composite prints. For example, in Local Extinction, Dumlao appropriates an early 18th century engraving of a bison that once inhabited the eastern United States. The original illustration was rendered by Mark Catesby, a British naturalist who traveled to the eastern United States in the early 18th century. As settlers from Europe pushed west, the bison became increasingly endangered, and extinct in the eastern United States. Dumlao titled the print Local Extinction, referring to how the bison once inhabited the eastern United States but is now extinct in this terrain. Dumlao places Catesby’s bison in a scene she photographed in Philadelphia’s wooded northwest. The bison stands above its reflection, and we might read this as a “ghost bison” of the east and its living counterpart in the west.

Naturalized considers the role of the pineapple as an icon of western colonization by merging two unexpected image sources. The antique source is an early 19th century book titled Pomona Britannica, which illustrates varieties of fruit grown in the greenhouses of British royal palaces and country houses. Since pineapples require a warm, humid climate for cultivation, wealthy British and European aristocrats of the period built special hothouses at enormous expense. The fruits of these labors –pineapples – were prominently displayed on banquet tables. The pineapple was a symbol of expanded colonial empires in tropical climates, and the wealth generated through imperialism that funded topical microclimates (aka extravagant hothouses). In Pomona Britannica, George Brookshaw presents a royal hothouse pineapple in an anthropomorphic “portrait” that resembles a head with a spiky plume of hair. The blurred line between human and tropical “crop” is indicative of the imperialist attitude toward individuals in territories under colonial rule. This brings us to the next chapter in the global history of the pineapple, in Hawai’i.

In her statement for Naturalized, Maria Dumlao notes that the pineapple is not a native fruit to Hawai’i. It is thought that the South American pineapple may have been first introduced in Hawai’i in the 18th century, but it wasn't until the late 19th century that pineapples became a commercial crop. The development of pineapple farming in Hawai’i is directly tied to the overthrow of the native Hawaiian Kingdom to suit western business interests. The Dole family had settled in Hawai’i as missionaries, and became key figures in the settler movements to westernize the island kingdom. Sanford B. Dole, who was born in Hawai’i in the 1840s, contributed to the 1887 “Bayonet Constitution'' that transferred power from Hawai’i’s royal government to American, European, and native elites. In 1893, the same group of overthrowers led a coup against the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Queen Lili’uokalani, and Sanford Dole became the territory’s president. He invited his cousin, James Dole, to join him in 1899, which set the Dole pineapple commercial farming in motion.

The coup against the Hawaiian Kingdom was linked to western business interests, but also to American imperialism in the Philippines. Hawaii was viewed as a strategic base for naval operations in the South Pacific in the Spanish-American War, which led to the United States taking colonial control over the Philippines from the Spanish in 1898. Maria Dumlao immigrated to the United States from the Philippines, and much of her artistic production unpacks the legacy of this history. Grounding her work in a symbol like the pineapple, she presents layered narratives that illuminate and complicate these histories. Another “naturalized” product is layered within the pineapple image. Cans of Spam – yes, the canned salted meat – are embedded in the fruit of the pineapple below its tall crown of leaves. As a shelf-stable protein, Spam was a staple food of American GI soldiers stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, and then became assimilated in Hawai’i as well as the Philippines as a result of the American colonial presence. The terms “naturalization” and “assimilation” typically refer to people. By linking these terms to agricultural products, Dumlao illuminates the connections between industry and overthrow.

Naturalized and Local Extinction are printed in a palette of red, green, and blue. When the prints are exhibited, visitors view them through colored lenses. Using the theory of color cancellation, parts of the imagery disappear or become more prominent according to what color is canceled. The lenses become a tool that visualize new ways of representing colonial narratives. This parallels ways in which histories become “canceled,” and it takes extraordinary effort and vision to make them visible. Both Maria Dumlao and Suchitra Mattai embody a model of careful research, personal experience, and radical vision in re-presenting colonial histories through archival imagery.

To learn more about Past Present Projects and read the full interviews with Maria Dumlao and Suchitra Mattai, visit PastPresentProjects.org.