AMIDST RELATIONS
GRAPHITE ON PAPER,

Constructed from disparate archival, personal, and mass-distributed images of women from the Indian Subcontinent, Maguire attempts to map a constellation of manners in which Anglo-Indian women found themselves equally enmeshed in the project of British Colonialism and alienated from the native peoples of British India (now Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) through projects of (violent) intimacy.

The image of Merle Oberon is used recurrently as both a prox and signifier for such intimate relations. Oberon was by her grandmother under the impression that she was her mother. Merle's grandmother gave birth to her mother who was born a child through rape on a plantation, who in turn, bore Merle through similar circumstances. As she garnered fame, and to bypass the racial segregation of America her grandmother/maid assumes the identity of her maid to maintain themselves as a family unit.
There are no images of her mother, so in place of a historical aporia she is substituted by images of Merle Oberon playing Cathy in Wuthering Heights ( a film largely about Britain's growing racial anxiety and elite cruelty) alongside a women acting as her maid.

AMISDT RELATIONS, CHICAGO, 2024

IMAGES PROVIDED COURTESY OF PATRON GALLERY, CHICAGO.