artist statement

I am an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work intersects photography, performance, and material culture to express and discuss culture through form and shape. My works speak of an African-multi-diasporic self and the possibility of self-transcendence through back-and-forth dance between individuality and plurality, celebrated in the poem by Muhammed Ali, Me We (Ali, 1975). I intersect photography and African diasporas using material culture to elevate photography, question how we relate to photography, and open meanings that the photographic medium can’t express on its own.

 

As a research-based artist, my process starts with the imbrication of personal memory and public history. My research is guided by a set of inquiries that, I hope, can lead to a visual articulation of We: 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?  

 

Asking these questions doesn't provide a path to answer them. As an artist, I use these questions to facilitate the creation of art as potential, as becoming, as an enunciation of an unfinished, indefinable, and inescapable We.