Artist Statement
My work investigates the ways in which public and private notions of Blackness are formed through embodied experience and the fictionalized reproduction of said experience through Film & Television media. Sourced from my grandmother’s photo archive and the public archive of media and industry trade publications, I abstract my subjects into pixilated squares removed from their context and history. Either strung together with metal rings to create multi-dimensional portrait composites, or collaged among the colors found in the television color bar - a historically discriminatory calibration tool that was never built for brown skin - I blur the boundaries of personal and public, real and performed, in order to disrupt the exclusionary representational systems that call for an identity monolith. Instead, I present a collective identity that demands recognition.
While within Film & Television, pixilation is associated with a moment of visibility disrupted, I create my work using this visual tool to frame my work in a state of unknowing as the complete knowing of an other is a fallacy of entertainment media. Instead, I reference the parts that make up the whole, and the spaces between legibility and abstraction that might inspire connection.