STUDIO

COMING SOON: AREA UNDER CONTRUCTION

Figures & still lifes

These works from 2014 to present explore abstracted figurative forms and still life paintings. This concurrent series of work speaks to histories of colonialism and diaspora through objects represented directly and plantlike figures whose bodies are seemingly in flux. The artist asks the viewer to imagine Black presence beyond the immediate surface of skin. In this sense, the figures and still lives are informed with objects and images that refer to Black labor, migration and healing while celebrating the multiplicity held within Black being.

Paper

In 2005 the artist began cutting velour paper, traditionally used for pastel, the rich black velvety surface offered spacial and poetic connotations for the artist’s explorations into Black subjectivity. Inspired by texts, film and music such as The Conjure Woman by Charles Chestnut, Manthia Diawara’s essay “Afro-Kitsch” and Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place,” the artist begins to question the solidity of the Black figure in visual culture or whether the ways in which it is visible speaks to the depth of its subjectivity. Evolving over many years, these cut paper and collage works explore iterations of form around the poetics of Black being. From earlier interventions in Western Mythology to building image metaphors for diaspora and migration, the work suggests a subject in flux, yet held by heritage, healing and time.

the gaze

In a series of works made between 2009-2015, figures find themselves among spaces and objects that recall Painting histories and ask the viewer to consider the obscurity of the Black subject in Art and in historical notions of beauty and pleasure. In doing this, the artist implicates traditions of image-making that have been shaped around a European standard. Inspired by the life of Civil Rights Activist, Josephine Baker who made her way through the entertainment world of 1920’s Parisian cabaret to the front lines of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movements the artist imagines a world of painting histories turned upside-down. The narrative follows a clan of women toiling with vestiges of Primitivism and Abstract painting as they build their world just beyond velvety floral borders. These work embrace humor, irony and mysticism while interconnecting the male gaze and the colonial gaze which has shaped Western perspectives around desire and agency.

EARLY

The artist’s earliest works explore commonalities in absurdity between Mythology and stereotype with ironic interventions in the cannon of Western Art History. The work fluctuates between figural and abstract formations. The artist spent time in Rome as a graduate student studying the “Sublime” and the Roman Baroque resulting in elation for the exuberance of crawling flora, fauna while unnerved by the grand display of power, decadence and violence. Commonalities to Black experience in America within such paradoxical relationships of absurdity, beauty and violence became clear. In this work one sees the development of visual language that continues to resurface in multifaceted ways throughout the artist’s career while image worlds and subject matter embrace variation and curiosity.