My work investigates facets of the Black American experience. Through a mostly “lens-based” practice, I focus on Blackness as I have lived it. I incorporate different modes of street and studio photography, as well as mixed media assemblages. By creating still lifes from found and personal objects, I decontextualize symbols that can be viewed as a part of my culture in a broad sense alongside objects that contain autobiographical elements. The objects and trinkets that I find on the street and ones that I select from my family home hold multiple meanings to me and society. 

My work highlights the inability of art to represent a culture as a whole by combining the general and the specific.I mix the historical formats of still life painting and 19th-century photography with modern art styles associated with pop culture magazines and music videos from the early 2000s to present an awareness of existing in multiple contexts. While I find it important for my art to comment on socio-political elements, such as race relations and police brutality, I create work that also represents and normalizes black joy and everyday life.

 

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