Acts of Refusal

This is a portrait of Richie, who is part of the HOWDOSAYYAMINAFRICAN? Collective, during the time when Michael Brown was fatally shot by the Ferguson Police. Richie’s back was turned away as an act of refusal to America’s consistent violence and denial of humanity towards Black lives. Police deaths continued with Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and countless others both known and unknown. Now it’s 2020, and the list still goes on with Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and George Floyd tearing open again and again the wound that hasn’t healed, that will never heal until the denial stops and true accountability begins…

PXALM - Eclipse

During this precarious downtime, I started working on a music video for my latest music collaboration, PXALM, with Angel Favorite and Lee Sobarzo. Gleaning from the public domain videos from the Prelinger Collection in archive.org, I was able to find hypnotic footage that reflected the dark romantic mood that I wanted to imbue. Working on this song felt apropos as it reminded me to remain tender and that everyone is needed to crease these times of fury and helplessness.

Art Feature in the Immigrant Artist Biennial

Grateful that The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) featured my work in their instagram in April. TIAB is a multi site artist-run project, presenting work by U.S based immigrant artists from around the world. To be presented in New York City every two years, TIAB sets out to form an international dialogue through exhibition of ambitious projects and events with an aim to facilitate a diverse and experimental discourse as well as build a globally connected and united community in the times of extreme anti-immigrant sentiment, unrest, discrimination and exclusion. For more information about their exhibitions and events visit their site www.theimmigrantartistbiennial.com

The unseen that holds all that is seen

Dark Matter - doorway, art object shadow, guard’s foot (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

This series is a meditation on the question of representation and the perceptual conditions that enable us to see not only art, but also multiple forms of difference. I photograph staircases, ceilings, passageways, and guards within museums, essential components that are seldom considered. They occupy a complicated relationship to functionality and value, much like the conditions of labor within capital. These triptychs center and translate peripheral bodies and spaces into alternate forms of possibility and agency by activating strategies of temporal looping, listening, and shadow work. I approach representation through sensation, in order to perceive the fullness of what is absent within the Western frame. These aesthetic disruptions shift dominant paradigms of objectification and labor to produce radical reorientations.

PINK MOON BIRTHDAY

Yesterday I felt complicated about my birthday during Corona time…During the day, I Facetimed with my family, and in the evening, I blew out the candles from the chocolate cake that Molly made for me from scratch while my friends watched from gridded screens. I felt grateful to have this moment with them while also feeling the unfathomable loss of the 731 who died in New York during the day. Words couldn’t come and a lump formed in my throat. I walked out to the dark yard and watched the moon move between the clouds and tree webs. The moon and I looked at each other wondering what we thought of all of this. Tonight is one of its closest times to the earth yet the distance is palpable…

In the meantime...

While the world seems to have stopped, uncertain, about everything we’ve known, not knowing what will happen next, while waiting inside, I look back at my journals marking the passing of certain days, how I took notes of things seen, heard, and read…encounters of certain moments found in translation…