STATEMENT OF WORK

I am a visual artist and athlete based in New Jersey. I make Works on paper, Zines, and I do black vernacular dance. I work from self constructed samples that are cut, repeated, iterated, and arranged to create carefully considered image/object hybrids. 

These objects feels most urgent to create when they reflects the phenomena that makes my daily life and the daily lives of the folks around me worth living. 

I am curious about how people might extrapolate from-in their daily lives rituals and practices of maintenance, training, and care- ways to cope with and sublimate from circumstances outside of their control and the perils of late stage capital extraction.

Black vernacular dance has become the most salient and clear phenomena for me to work from in this process: the spontaneity, the hyperlocal environments and the fleeting nature of the circumstances that might make it happen proves to be fertile aesthetic and poetic ground to plant others situations into.

Images of Queer Fellowship especially among black gay men and other queer people of color sprout from an ethic of “Doing” and questions about  acts of preparation.

How does one make family and community with urgency and care? 

How does our collective creativity solve the philosophical quagmires of personal failure?

How can we cultivating these practices that enrich our communities and draw us closer together?

I am also curious about how through working through these question we might find ourselves becoming better stewards of the land, the fantastical and ultimately how we build effective, accountable and safe communities with one another that systemically shed shame and greed.