george was a good little monkey, and very curious. curiosity killed the cat. it did not kill george, it just domesticated him. what does george tell us about children? what does george tell us about people who are thought of as children?

i chose this text to delve into my own ideal of children's images as they relate to society. in colonial discourse theory, colonial subjects are seen as savages in infantile stages of human development. they are untamed and childish. h.a. rey, curious george's creator, gives us a strong and prime glimpse of this attitude. monkeys are often metaphors for colonials--unkempt, almost as smart as "real" humans, physically adept, and always so curious.

the process of re-texting this book became a difficult aesthetic endeavor. how could i tackle ideology without becoming overly trite or didactic? perhaps most importantly, i wanted to see how i could critique the images while simultaneously loving and fostering the aesthetic.

after reading parts of Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest and her analysis of "soap" and cleanliness in the colonial imagination, i began to look for images within the colonial context, especially those of cleanliness. i also drew inspiration from Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks to explore the infantalized colonial subject in a context of phallic threat. in particular, other text sources i used include Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (pgs 20-21) and George Michael's "Monkey (pgs. 22-23)."

i started with working in photoshop to manipulate rey's original imagery. i wanted to play with different forms of scribblings, transparency and translucence. masking, cloaking, and covering-up are key elements to colonial action. i also find them to be extremely beautiful aesthetic strategies. what becomes distorted? what is still clear? what new images are created?