ARTIST STATEMENT
Having died to the artist who for two decades expressed herself solely through dance, I now undertake an interdisciplinary exploration with movement and form at its foundation. My practice incorporates photo and video imagery, text, textiles, sculpture and healing practices. It is principally concerned with healing the severed psyche.
Drawing on mythology, folklore, fairytale, and Afro-futurist thought, l employ various creative tactics to engage and convey my observations on racial and gender inequalities. Among these tactics is my use of a body-based font that challenges the viewer to oscillate between text and figuration.
Tar Baby Code, as the font is called, takes its name from the classic African-American folk tale in which the trickster Br’er Rabbit outwits Br’er Fox who has laid a sticky trap for him. This font asks the viewer to engage with the history of Black resistance through literacy and elusive, coded vernacular. Employed in statements of gratitude, observation and protest it renders legible the Black female figure’s expressive force as a site of such resistance.
In “Redemption! The Black Unicorn Wormhole,” I draw on sources ranging from Egyptian and medieval European mythology, and African-American folklore, to photography from the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. These source materials become the building blocks of a present from which immediate transit is possible to the past as well as myriad possible futures, via the wormhole. This body of work posits slipping through space-time as a form of resistance.
I invite you, dear viewer, to venture through the wormhole. The price of entry is self-reflection in the light of our most fraught and unsettled shared histories. Passage through means tear and suture, dismemberment and reconstitution, death and resurrection. The reward is a redemptive, healing balm.
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