artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work intersects photography, performance, and material culture to destabilize colonial and post-colonial cultural legacies through form and shape.  As a transnational individual of African, Indigenous, Iberian, and Franco-Anglo-Saxon descent, my works touch on issues of translation and content transference of African diasporas, colonial and post-colonial cultural legacies, visualities, and cosmologies, using material culture to challenge photography and its Eugenicist tradition, question how we relate to photography as an indexical device and open decolonizing possibilities.

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As a research-based artist, my process starts with the imbrication of photography, personal memory, and public history. My research is guided by a main research question: If He Changed My Name, then…? This question alludes to an American gospel song related to Christian baptism, rebirth, and the violence of changing names. It also suggests a consequence: a reinvention of the Self through a reinvention of one’s spiritual practices. Such an existential question creates the perfect conditions to artistically explore materiality, demateriality, and remateriality through questions such as What are the implications of collapsing stories and cultures within an object?  What role do photographs have in forging such collapse? What are alternative, historic, and/or legacy photographic processes for?  Whose history, whose legacy, alternative to what? I explore possibilities through a practice that is not only non-pure but is based on non-purism.