As humans, we are limited. My work focuses on the limitations of human ability and the ways in which we construct devices— often using technology or other proxies—to extend our limits: particularly the limits of perception, attention, connection, and categorization. Through painting, installation, sculpture, and video I explore the ways in which we negotiate and push these boundaries every day.

 In 2018, I blissfully and briefly fled the constraints of societal bounds and hiked hundreds of miles through the landscape of the American West on the Pacific Crest Trail.

 As a painter I explore the connections between figures and landscapes, and how they both impact each other. I paint figures that are at odds with their surroundings and simultaneously integral to them. These multilayered portrayals speak to the complexity of a person, exploring the visible that is obscure and the visible that is perceptible. My method of ripping, incising, painting, drawing, and incorporating mixed media creates a new figure that is meant to jolt the viewer out of their comforting perceptions, assumptions, and perspectives.

 My works are about symbolic language and engrained memories. Imagery is rooted in my experience growing up in the South, boyhood and coming of age, pop culture, and family influences. Through a process of associative memory recollection I recreate imagery that references both nostalgic and unsettling times on bare surfaces, using personal storytelling, found imagery, cultural icons, and corporate marketing tools from TV and internet culture. The works combine joy and grief in order to question my memory and what might have been fabricated with time.

 I focus on painting figures who are simultaneously revealed and veiled. Missing pieces, hidden images, and vacancies confront the ongoing behavior of dismissing female identity and perspective. As a mother, I am confronted by my own matrilineal misinformation, and my work engages myths of femininity, medicine, motherhood, and religion to expose the historical subjugation of women by imposing absurd ideals of beauty and behavior.

 I make paintings and objects that represent figures as geological and psychological extensions of landscape. My paintings depict hermits, wanderers, ramblers—a visual trope of a performative body susceptible to the elements. Through narrative frameworks, I mine vernacular narratives, fantasy, folkloric geographies, and a discourse on representation. Folklore is a register for renegotiating the nature of perception, sacrificing realism in order to gain a new truth. Denaturalizing a subject through the carnivalesque exposes the underbelly of sensation and perception.

 My work is concerned with issues of place and representation, more specifically the dubious nature of home and belonging for African Americans in the Southern US. Figures are depicted with backs turned, in extremely low light, or backlit so the details of their appearance are cast in shadow.

 My work investigates the psychological binds within the female experience through surreal environments. I am looking to the social expectations of women and the resulting feeling of shame women experience when we do not live up to these social norms. The female bodies within my work are surrounded by patterning to evoke the overwhelming feelings of shame and the fragmentation of the self.

As a disabled Black woman, I have a desire for people to accept or appreciate me for both my surface and what’s below it; to humanize me not because of my appearance, but despite it. My paintings channel the complexity of my identity. I create a surface of works that are richly layered, both demanding attention and refusing any simple legibility.