Using photo personal and published photo archives of family, news media, & entertainment media, I make representational figurative paintings, drawings, & installations that explore the influence our media diets, as well as both true and false perceptions of identity, have on marginalized people. Like the tonal, neutral, and dark color schemes visible in my works on paper, the experiences of Black life I depict are nuanced & hard-won; waiting to be excavated, safely entombed under layers of history, and organic materials with past lives, like charcoal, ash, and calabash chalk.

I probe feelings of disorientation and discomfort with my artwork. As a response to this speculative cultural moment, I’m hoping to create visual confusion and a tolerable amount of distress. Associations of Black, dark, and evil in the cultural consciousness can be disentangled & complicated. Because the depicted figures & scenes must be studied to be identified, the work resists passive viewing. I’m inviting you to face down a veil into the dark – the vector for the unknown -, and to allow yourself to be courted by that darkness, seen by it, seduced, and invited grow a relationship with the dark. Like exposure therapy (repeated controlled confrontations with a feared stimuli), I’m creating curated encounters with the unknown.