Artist Statement
My practice explores the body through the prisms of age, gender, race, sexuality and history. I consider memory, myth, ritual, desire and the spaces the body occupies within these vignettes. The narratives move between past, present and surreal projections of the future, sometimes occupying these spaces simultaneously.
I am interested in peering beneath things. My installations, collage, performance and photographs address issues attendant to the politics of the black body. I remediate personal and familial histories through an archiving of objects, and geographies. I examine my own habit of collecting as a means of identity construction, working toward the building of personal, familial and community history as counter-narrative to American history, re-centering black female subjectivity.
I explore the ritualized use of materials, objects, and architectural spaces, often queering their size, orientation or form to blur the line between memory, dream and experience, plotting the relationship between normative considerations of the body and its function in specified spaces. I use racially identified signifiers to twist and turn mythologies about the body and the spaces, places and histories that it occupies, often landing at the concept of home as both physical structure and repository for history, memory and myth. The narratives move between past, present and surreal projections of the future, sometimes occupying these spaces simultaneously.