Supporting Materials
Artist Statement
I am interested in engaging with the soft boundaries/boundarylessness that exist within Nature,
the mind and organisms of memory to shift our prevailing views of what constitutes as Natural.
By delving into the substrate of our senses, and our environment, I reconsider how blackness will be transformed and enhanced in the future. By exploring aspects of traditional African and Indigenous rituals, ethnobotany, and plant signaling, I am able to construct new worlds that acknowledge the existence and importance of indigenous technologies. I am fascinated by these practices and their proximity to object-oriented theory, virtual realities, remote sensing, and other terms of mediation coined by the technological community.
The spiritual beliefs of Ifa, African American, and Caribbean folk rituals, are the crux of my work.
The mind expansive experiences of meditation, dreams, psychedelics, and other plant technologies provide gestures for traversing the human. With these tools, I implore herbalism, sculpture, video, and installation to illustrate and redefine how rituals by people of color will look, feel, and sound like in the far future.
Below are examples of direction and past work. To view my CV please click the link to the left.
* Videos and images can be viewed in full screen and with sound
01 COLLAGE
02 VIDEO
ii. bodies
2020
Single Channel Video
new air
2020
Single Channel Video
03 INSTALLATION
New Air
2020
Bioplastic, Plant Hormone, Georgia Red Clay, Soil From My Mother's Garden, Steel, Single Channel Video
Waterlust
2018
Fabric, Mirrored Dibond, Sound, Grant Park
04 SCULPTURE
Chakra Radionics
2017
Ceramics, Mullen, Sage, Lavander, Incense, Mirrors
04 WRITING
New Air
Spring is a damp, musty collection of ruddied earth, fish and yellow.
Its air holds with it a certain moment of nostalgia.
Waiting is embedded into the invisible haze that coats the skin of this place.
My mind can trace exactly the feel of it
Once the rain comes, neon green bursts out against sky.
A nauseatingly perfect baby blue.
How can a place so old and wrecked with melancholy be so you?
Its history feels like at the moment of conception, particles of iron clay were impregnated into the proteins of your DNA and now it is you.
Tethering remotely across landmasses, dusty driveways, Xaymaca, oceans and through molecules, you can feel its heat.
Its humid signature is your lungs.
How you observe breathing.
Sticky but very necessary.
Can you bring this with you?
The place feels like it has inhabited itself in your belly.
Encased by a glass orb.
You hold it and pieces of it escape when you speak into new air.
Some of it wraps itself around your projections and wishes.
Resonates.
The body begins to worry that all of it may be given over to this new place.
How can you replenish it?