STATEMENT OF WORK

   As an interdisciplinary artist, my body of work combines sculpture, installations, and collage to address existing racial and social issues through the use of symbolism and allegory. Using the dichotomy of observing printed magazines as a dying medium, while remaining a perfect representation of contemporary culture, I am able to focus my practice on critiquing consumerism and its stance as an alleged colorless concept. 

Compulsively and mathematically, I digest this content. Flipping through thousands of pages daily to find my specific need; a single page that has one side depicting a face and on the other side a specific color. The thinness of magazine paper allows for each cut swatch to have translucency. As light is able to slightly pass through the paper you are able to visualize both sides at once. My process is to not only categorize my swatches by the single color on each backside but to, in tandem, categorize them by the race that is represented on each. Continuously cutting and collecting multitudes of swatches, each a different combination. For example, on one side the smiles could consist of Black and Brown individuals only while on the other side a monotone color is present.

The majority of my magazines and materials come from the streets of New York, being found by chance or through countless Craigslist's interactions. Subtly my work also speaks to this narrative of society's compulsion to waste in large quantities, whether intentionally or subconsciously. In parallel, I pointedly aim to bury and reconstruct the overt racial narratives that are told through these specific images. I want to cut it out and literally frame it with samples of the very source of racial confusion. My goal as an artist is to expose the underlying themes that have been built into the images we as humans consume and accept daily.

 As a native Baltimorean, at a young age I began collecting images. I immersed myself heavily in magazines, ephemera, and material fragments from the streets of B-more, forming my own environment, while subconsciously also creating my own language as a young black queer. Through this lens, I saw celebrities in swimming pools, $15,000 Chanel handbags, and an endless sea of generic smiling faces. I ultimately gazed at this media with light humor, as I do share the same birthday with Dave Chappelle after all. The world identified in my collection of magazines emphasized an inherent negation to the conditions of my surroundings. Life inside the magazine pages didn't really represent my experience of living. In Baltimore City, my surroundings were predominantly Black. Magazines depict “normal” American life, and that is not one of Blackness. Confused and simultaneously motivated by the content of magazines, I intuitively wanted to glean and merge the plethora of ads with the question of who is the consumer, and how the producer identifies with a young Black man.