Doug Beube
Other
7 x 7
x 7
in
Wash is a text-based installation featuring a collection of specially crafted soap bars etched with racial slurs and epithets. (For the current exhibition at Seager Gray Gallery, “Other” is one bar of soap being shown). Carefully set onto a wall of soap dishes, this arrangement invites participants to wash their hands with a bar, letting the ink flow from the letters and mix with the white suds and lather. The work explores what it is to be an ‘other,’ the object of ethnic, religious, sexist or homophobic insults, asking what it might take to cleanse disdainful speech from the collective consciousness. The quote by Dr. King expresses the essence of the meaning of the full exhibition entitled, Wash.
“We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.“
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution." March 31, 1968
