AT THE MOMENT...
My practice oscillates between figuration and abstraction, and across painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation. Each mixed-media expression parallels my fragmented existence living between my home in Kingston, Jamaica, and the United States.
I create images of Black life that reject the distortion, misrepresentation, and erasure of Black history typically centered on degradation and suffering. I embrace light, color, and non-traditional materials to create opportunities for witnessing, not occupying, scenes of Black life in its splendor and ordinariness. Rooted in my Monolith assemblages of post-consumption waste, my latest works depict metallic-skinned subjects in scenes from family albums, archives, and social media.
As I consider the Black body as both vessel and substance, each intimate yet quasi-anonymous metallic portrait complicates the concept of identity and skin color-as-race. They embody bling, shine, and glow to highlight the conspicuous consumption of Black bodies, resist erasure, and illuminate the duality of being coveted and discarded. In my world, Black skin is durable, weatherproof, conductive, magnetic, flexible, percussive, and indestructible. These lustrous figures offer unusual interactions with images of Blackness and invoke metaphors of the Black body that position skin as much more than an indicator of race.