Stacey Tyrell's self-portraits respond to her identity as an Afro-Caribbean Canadian with European heritage. In her series Backra Bluid, taking its name from a hybrid of Afro-Caribbean slang—backra, meaning “white master,” and bluid, the Scottish word for “blood”—the artist dresses up as various female archetypes and lightens her skin to appear white.

She titles the images with a made-up name and ages that somehow feel tied to who we think each woman might be. Ertha, 44 Years, for example, wears a luxurious fur coat and expensive-looking earrings. She's a character you might have seen in a TV show like LA Law, a mid-90s soap opera or a Tina Barney photograph. Wealthy, extravagant, but a little out of place. Or Bonnie, 35yrs. and Twins Lara & Maisie, 9yrs—a mother and twins dressed in prep school regalia and photographed in front of a nondescript background—or Ailis, 21yrs. (2012), who poses with her tennis racket and other signs of wealth in front of a wood wall.

The women in each of these photos confront viewers with distant, emotionless stares that, exaggerated by the digital tools used to lighten their skin, feel conscious and almost sci-fi. Tyrell isn't trying to fool viewers, but instead, creates a sense of questioning or unease. While each woman has a nearly identical lightened skin tone, their non-European features vary. Perhaps they are “passing” as white, inspiring an additional layer of questioning for viewers.

This work reflects Tyrell’s experience growing up attending predominantly white schools, and receiving strange, inquiring stares when she mentioned her European heritage. Backra Bluid was not only an opportunity to confront a racist glare but to imagine what her white relatives may have looked like, as well as her own perceptions of white identity. “It allows me to step outside of myself for a bit,” Tyrell says, “by donning a costume and trying on a gaze that I never experience in my actual life.”

In one of her latest photos—published for the first time here in VICE—Tyrell presents two photoshopped versions of herself. In one, she’s dressed in the 1700s Georgian style, whitened skin, with an elaborate hairstyle popular among the aristocracy of the time. On the other is Tyrell as a black woman holding a papaya, a vague allusion to Caribbean slang for vagina. “I'm trying to convey,” says Tyrell, “the way that both white and black femininity have been intertwined and codependent of one another in a historical and colonial context.” Across all of Tyrell’s work, self-portraiture is a tool for figuring out larger ideas and potential universal truths about the construction of identity, Western history, and to “ flesh out ideas with no one watching.”