What is my work about?
Through photography, installation, set design, and sculpture I build non-linear narratives and hyper-real environments that document speculative epics in relation to my identity. Juxtaposing elements from Afro-futurism, bio-punk, trans humanism, and post Black ideologies, I create characters in constructed environments that question notions of human-ness as well as Blackness. My characters and environments blur the lines of figurative representation and the abstract. Drawing influence from abstract painting and fashion editorials, my textured, highly saturated imagery stems from personal obsessions with plasticity, artificiality, and the idea of self-creation.
As my work continues to build on itself, I seek to physically experiment with invisibility, and how abstraction and photography can serve as a metaphor through which I can hide and reveal the body; much like the politics surrounding the visibility of Blackness, and individuals of the African diaspora.
Artist Statement
I am a photographer and mixed media artist who explores and complicates colliding theories and histories of Black representation and speculation. I use photography, set design, installation and sculpture as a means to represent my own biomythography, a phrase coined by Audre Lorde, through non-traditional portraiture. Often performing for the photographic lens, I create personal mythologies, push against oppressive histories and consider the queer body.
Here a coded non-linear narrative in which Black and queer bodies, most often my own, are manipulated and transformed into beings or concepts that are defined in my on-going epic; an epic to speculate my blackness, invisibility, and existence through texture, color, and form.
Through an active investigation of light’s properties, I utilize color, or lack-there-of, to address the notion of invisibility, in reference to Ralph Ellison, as an ever-changing occurrence of visibility. I sample various histories of Black representation, pop culture, music, fashion and literature in order to construct hyper realities that reinforce my biomyth.
The utilization of sexual tropes such as BDSM, are used to bind and restrict the body in order to provoke Kafkaesque metamorphoses; metamorphoses that represent the constant flux of the Black psyche. I create physical masks that simultaneously conceal and reveal forms that engage with post-human and post-Black ideologies, a process that reflects my desire to project and complicate my notion of self. In dealing with the notion of self, the forms created serve as self-imposed mental and physical bindings on the body, in order to evoke psychological traumas. In particular, my ongoing series, Helios v. Heru, operates as an exploration of astrophysics and double consciousness. Within space and time contains two conflicting solar deities, European and African, existing in one space such as photons do, are living out a restricted existence forever linked to one another. My deities represent the twins of consciousness that are constantly tested much like that of Dr. Mengele’s infamous experiments of Auschwitz, only society is the twisted scientist. The Black American experience is but a bad tale of science fiction; eugenics, castration and sterilization, phrenology, etc. are all fair game in building my narrative. Science Fiction and Afro futurism exist as a freedom to escape a reality that feels a bit manufactured itself. My stories often reflect that of social dilemma. I see my own constructed environments as realms to live out my own insecurities, twisted fantasies, and even utopian delusions.
CV
EDUCATION
2013
MFA Photography & Related Media
Parsons, The New School for Design, New York, NY
2011
B.A. Art and Digital Media, Art History Minor
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
2010
Temple University, Japan Campus
テンプル大学ジャパンキャン パス ,Tokyo, Japan
SELECT EXHIBITIONS
[Group]
2014
Hyper-Active, Parsons Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, Shanghai, China
2013
More of This, Less of Everything Else: MFA Thesis Exhibition, Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY
Future Projections, White Studios, Auckland, New Zealand
Align: Parsons MFA Photography, Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA
2012
Groupshow, Counterspace Gallery, Las Vegas, NV
Charterparty, Parsons MFA Photography, Photoville, Brooklyn, NY
Parts and Labor II, Atrium Gallery, Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Hennessy Youngman Presents: IT’S A SMALL, SMALL WORLD, Family Business Gallery, New York, NY
Parts and Labor, Atrium Gallery, Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA
2011
Tyler School of Art BA Senior Thesis Exhibition, Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2013
More of This, Less of Everything Else, Parsons MFA Photography Thesis Exhibition Catalog