Like Mother, Like Daughter
Dana Boussard, Ariana Boussard-Reifel, Stan Reifel
Arlee, Montana, and New York City, New York
Like Mother, Like Daughter, 2007
Photography
In this piece, the mother paints the words of a white supremacist text on her daughter’s bare body. What once was pure and innocent quickly becomes sullied, illegible, and monstrous. This act, performed by a parent to a child, speaks to the concept that ideology is not innate, and that hate is a pattern taught through socialization. By painting, the mother is indoctrinating. This act of pigmenting, of course, has another connotation. There is an unsubtle racial overtone to the piece. The desired endpoint of the white supremacist book, which espouses a pure white race, is met with its opposite when the text transforms the body. Black and white, good and bad, pure and tainted, are all left without specific values, because the text is actualizing its own antonym.
Bio
Dana Boussard and Stan Reifel, along with their daughter Ariana, are artists working both together and separately in a variety of media between Arlee, Montana, and New York City. Dana Boussard has had a 40-year career creating award-winning artwork in textiles, stained glass, and painting. She is in the collection of notable public buildings, including the Boise Statehouse, the Anchorage Airport, and multiple Federal Reserve locations. Stan Reifel began his career as a fine furniture designer and transitioned into exhibition design, reimagining the DeYoung, Rockefeller Collection in San Francisco, as well as directing the groundbreaking fine crafts gallery, The Fairtree, in New York City. Ariana Boussard-Reifel works as a fine artist, showing nationally in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Art and Design in New York. Her primary focus is now on jewelry design, merging her background in sculpture with wearable objects.