That Survival Apparatus
As a point of departure, my work uses the poem “Mask” by Maya Angelou as a lens to view various mediascapes. Central to this idea are notions of black fugitivity, improvisation, and negation. This position questions notions of the archive and how it thinks of itself in relation to Africa diasporic ontology. The work is concerned with how things are kept and dispersed in black culture. Because of such concerns, there is a strategy within the imagery to leave things rendered visible and in other places invisible. The work is not concerned with changing this positionality in an explicit way that makes aware a critique, but rather the function of the work is to suggest an understanding of ontology that is not always revealed on the surface. I use painting, printmaking, performance, and video to suggest a layered reflection of this counter archive.
"Take it one level deeper — and when we’re thinking about the numinous, when we’re thinking about the sacred, it always asks us to move more deeply, to head towards the depths — when one considers the deeper histories, where those of us who emerge from the social death of slavery, from that ontological precarity of slavery, there’s also the fact that silence is not just our inheritance, but it’s also a methodology"-Junot Diaz
"I am a poet and I have to draw from these densities...from these phantasmagories. For my poetry, I don't just want it to become a place on the map, becasue the truth is you never can leave home. You take it wherever you go. Its under the skin. It moves the tougue or slows it, colors your thinking impedes on the logic."-Maya Angelou