Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer, and performer who integrates cultural criticism, personal narrative, social practice, and historical research to interrogate structures of power concerning race and representation. I aim to stretch the boundaries of what painting is—I experiment with mixed media/collage, creating critiques of colonialism using painting and drawing as tools for interruption. My art practice is research-based in that I study the Black femme body as a construction and uncharted geography that is constantly navigating through multiple layers of perception, time, and spatiality. My practice includes collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities as well as projects that are intimate and based upon my private experiences in relation to historical events and contexts. Within my studio practice, I conduct extensive experimentation and play in which I form several bodies of work simultaneously.

While at Headlands

While in residence I am planning to continue working on developing a new body of work called THEY that has been conceptually brewing for the past 10 years. THEY is about the persistence of colonial occupation and how it affects our current political state and relationships to geography, culture, and natural resources. Through the examination of colonial architectural structures, their impact upon the people, flora, and fauna of their environments, and the push and pull between indigeneity, empire, imperialism, globalism, and mass dissemination of hegemonic states of being, I am examining our relationship to trafficking, being trafficked, and becoming un-trafficked. Through a practice of painting, collage, and manipulation of the scale and context of colonial postcard imagery disseminated throughout Europe and America as expressions of colonial power in the late 19th century, I am turning my gaze upon the culprits who created these visual fictions and absolute rule.