STATEMENT OF WORK

Category: Femme Queen aka The Empress

With the fruits of my creative labor, I seek to leverage what privilege I do have for my people like Hadassah before Xerxes. If my ego death was Marie Antoinette at the guillotine, I would like my art to be the storming of the Bastille.

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The false matrix has projected an identity as the demonized Other upon me. However, I choose to identify as a non-binary, femme-identifying, pansexual, first-generation Liberian-American multidisciplinary creator + transmutor, abolitionist, and Ethereal Being. This reclaimed identity is the longest performance art piece I will ever give and is – as with all things– subject to change.

The naïeve internalization of the violent projections of the false matrix pushed me towards a provocative, iconoclastic personality as well as a punk aesthetic and camp sensibility. My practice of creative self-expression serves as a form of exorcism that distills the prima materia within me into its essence. I do this through many different– often interwoven– disciplines such as writing, painting, photography, sound architecture, performance, installation. Each medium serves as a different language to better communicate my Message with, creating more access points to arrive through.

Coding– as with the externalization of camp sensibility– is a means of safety and survival, just as the characteristic peacocking of American Black culture was a means of protecting pride and maintaining a cultural connection to African roots. I sense safety in that which is unspoken but signified because for so long it has been unsafe to speak my Truth unto the world. Instead of overtly documenting the parts of myself that were and in many ways remain dangerous within this anti-indigenous death machine we call Western society, I use symbols, icons, and indexes to signify that which if you know, you know. 

Perhaps it is because I grew up watching MTV, which foregrounded my love for media and fascination with pop culture, but I easily identify with mutinous and reclamatory visualizations of disenfranchised identity and experience as with Nan Goldin’s documentation of the Lower East Side scene of the 80s, the David Lachappelle campaigns of the late 90s and early aughts, and the maximalism of Hype Williams music videos. 

This rebellion against the puritanical hierarchy of colonial capitalism– which is conjured from the blood, sweat, tears, and veritable tons of flesh of indigenous peoples the world over– parallels the reactionary nature of Rococo art against the rigidity of French classicism. I also find myself attracted to the lush decadence of Rococo not just for its pastels but because the adornment and excessive ornamentation– which was later seen as gauche– feels to me like a reminder of the boundless potential and generosity of the feminine. 

It is that infinite abundance is the inherent nature of the Universe, therefore the birthright of all beings– not just the privileged elite. To co-opt the aesthetics of luxury which is inherently excessive (within a finite binary), especially as a Black member of the proletariat and an indigenous African is a subversion of the Protestsant Puritanism that undergirds colonial capitalism. It is a rejection of the desecration of femininity and the glorification of masculinity, austerity, and rigidity. It is a reminder that life doesn’t have to be so serious, and we could all benefit from a lot more fun.