Artist Statement
My work investigates the ways in which public and private notions of Blackness and the Black family are formed through embodied experience and attempted reproduction of said experience through Film & Television media. Sourced from my grandmothers’ photo archives and the public archive of industry trade publications, I question the influence of external representational systems on Black interiority.
The color palette of my paintings is an interpolative nod to the television color bar, a visual calibration tool used to help viewers "see" on their home tv monitors. However, the visual framework of that system was built for white skin and discriminatorily left Black people discolored and further othered on screen. I subvert that representational system by using the vibrant colors that make up the color bar, chrome, and collage to render beauty in moments of Black domesticity.
My sculptures explore the relationship between skin and body and interiority and exteriority. I abstract Black bodies into squared pixels which I then string together with metal chains to create a collage composite. The collages are then draped over corporally inspired ceramic forms that are painted chrome as an interpolative nod to television static.
While within the context of Film & Television, pixilation and static are associated with a moment of visibility disrupted where the subject is no longer accessible to be more deeply known by the viewer, I create my portraits using these visual tools 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.