BODY, 2022
For many years, my work has been concerned with the body – particularly, the femme body – as performed, signified, commodified, and autonomous. My early portraits of sex workers, friends, artists, self, and heroes (generally interchangeable) utilized salvaged and/or ordinary materials to enlist their poetics and trace energies. Over time, this body metaphor has expanded to include variations of geographies, plants and plant colonies, and collectives of persons as locations of alterity and keepers of trauma, joy, and knowledge.
The exhibition Body comprises paintings, reductive drawings, assemblage, and video informed by fellowship in healing, spiritual, celebratory, and social justice realms. I continue to employ collage and assemblage techniques to reintroduce the detritus of post-capital as witnesses, both foiled and fed by montages of animistic flora cut outs.
DESTINATION (UN)KNOWN: THE VALUE OF FORGETTING IN ORDER TO RE-CALL, 2019
This series included video, paintings, and photographs. I use different media as expressions of a singular yet fluid concept; this body of work is driven by the video Where Are You, (2019) though overall, the project has been long in the making. Where Are You employs footage of Louisiana’s waterways as metaphor for impermanence and regeneration. I have been contemplating the ways we as a species and we as members of families and communities can achieve a sense of being grounded, particularly within shifting landscapes and political instability.
Last year, I purchased ten old bulletin boards that were covered in generations of photos and press clippings of an old New Orleans family. Over time, the spaces between the photos had become grimy from exposure to nicotine, creating ghostly grids of memories past. Much of my own family history is unknown to me due to the effects of historical trauma and my own memory loss resulting from a coma years ago. In Where Are You, I merge my old family photos and films with the bulletin board grid and moving waterscapes. As I had taken some time away from my studio practice to manage my mother’s health care, our amorphous generational histories have emerged as constant topics of conversation. In Where Are You, the soundscape is presented is as it was onsite, with nature’s “songs” and the flow of human activities. If you listen closely, you will hear a community sharing a transcendent moment.
The bulletin boards also serve as painting frameworks to both follow and disrupt, seeking the poetic over the stable. Metal thumbtacks stand as sentinels for fixed locations of what is in actuality, fleeting. Photographs depict scenes from the many spaces throughout Southern Louisiana in which Where Are You was filmed, some emphasizing the sublime ephemeral and in others, the impact of transitional economies.
PASSENGER, 2016
My film, PASSENGER, employs trauma and melancholia as generative tools for transformation. To this end, I mine the locations where personal and collective narratives intersect with the detritus of American capital. PASSENGER evolved out of a ten-year photographic exploration of abandoned cars in the woods and junkyards of rural Maine. In identifying my own unsettled relationship with cars, I could then extend such experience and sensation to broader polarities of empowerment and disempowerment. Here, the body of the car door - the literal and figurative portal - signals a pathway to catharsis.
PASSENGER also extends my ongoing investigations into representations of the female-gendered body in the iconic treatment of the car door. Countless songs, prose, and commercial copy have equated cars to girls. As surrogate to my gender's objectified, fetishized and thus disembodied state, the door functions as a "silent twin" to stories untold as author Jeanette Winterson may have envisioned. My own stylized body in performance enacts both takeover and memorial of environs both psychic and tangible. The performative lexicon used in the film derives from rituals rooted in a broad range of sources that include cleansing rites, various funerary traditions, the Veil of Veronica, the enchanting power of glitter in burlesque and queer performance, and punk DIY aesthetics. In my employment of second-hand objects as narrative props, I strive to tap both the archetypal and the personal in a populist, post-consumer manner.
PASSENGER's soundtrack is comprised of musical works both commissioned for this project and previously published by Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds, Bob Bert, and Rafael Attias. As abstract vignettes in themselves, these songs speak to the aural archives of popular American memory.