What is my work about?
I’m a Sculptor that works across disciplines, which includes installation, performance, video, objects and painting. I’m an informer, surveilling the surveillor, documenting and gathering, who’s interested in creating tension and evoking the viewer’s relationship to content through strategies such as beauty, confrontation, scale, light, shadow and material specificity. My objective is to communicate directly by distilling ideas, juxtaposing a few forms or images instead of many to reveal and extract the essence of what is sometimes complex and multi-layered content. Usually, I’m searching for strategies that engage the viewer to consider a proposition or premise that is unfamiliar to them; I want the viewer to locate themselves within the content of my work. My studio practice is ritualistic, through gesture, mark-making, performance, and at times meditative labor that manifests in seriality within forms.
Artist Statement
I create new critical perspectives on dominant historical and contemporary narratives. My work often isn’t about what is present but what isn’t, and how that defines the subject, or viewer. Institutions or locations connected to society but not of it, and the liminal spaces between these containers of the deviant, those in crisis, archives, and illusion; spaces that we inhabit, sometimes briefly, often being watched are ideas found within my work. My current bodies of work address issues of incarceration, surveillance, and the U.S. penal and criminal justice systems and, has been exhibited in multiple mediums (video, photography, objects, installation and paintings). The graphite and blackboard series are architectural footprints of U.S. prisons. This is an ongoing series, and like Robert Smithson’s “nonsite” sculptures are abstractions of real places. They’re metaphors for those incarcerated, forgotten and placed in “nonsites.” My sculpture “Bones Crusade” is extracted from this work, it’s cross shape is derived from the footprint of the Everglades Correctional Facility in Florida. The installation “Rumination” evokes a private library or reading room, where viewers are invited to contemplate themes of race and power in American history and culture. It implies the connection of chattel slavery and the U.S. Prison Industrial Complex by juxtaposing works from the prison aerial series, a large imposing chair of white and black dominos, and a Malvina Hoffman early modern sculptural portrait, titled “Senegalese Soldier” from the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection. Recently, dominos are a frequent material used in my practice as an anthropomorphic marker and the random patterns they create that mimic digital circuit panels; a reflection of the contemporary and interconnectivity.
NY Highway was inspired by a 1966 Artforum interview “Talking with Tony Smith” by writer and art historian Samuel Wagstaff for Artforum. Here, Tony Smith discusses his move to “pure forms” from architecture. In addition, he describes a life transforming night driving on the New Jersey Turnpike before it opened to the public. “There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it. …its effect would liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not any expression in art.” “NY Highway” is appropriated live traffic cams captured and downloaded from the internet. The glowing black and white surveillance clips reveal the formal qualities of each roadway. The distorted low frames per second live video becomes an abstracted moving painting, mimicking the liminal space between the thoughts of a road passenger; the viewer watching the viewer, being watched.
As a 2013 Fulbright Research Fellow in Salvador da Bahia, I explored my interest in African roots in contemporary art practices in Brazil. There, I researched traditional materials, processes, iconography and social conditions that inform art practices from mid twentieth century to the present. My research’s primary focus was artists and movements that affect social change such as Tropicalismo or Tropicalia, and to a lesser degree Cinema Novo. As there can be no separation of the visual and ritual of Afroreligion from visual art in Brazil, my research also included the iconography of Candomble, the traditional Afro Brazilian religion originating in West Africa. My research is personal and ongoing, I’m compelled by the practice of using materials and objects in their natural or least transformed state and how they are used to transmit meaning as in religious ritual, shrines and altars of the orishas or African deities worshipped in Ifa and Ifa derived religions in the Americas and throughout the African Diaspora.
CV
EDUCATION
2010
Masters of Fine Art, Sculpture, Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts
2005
Bachelors of Art, Visual Arts, SUNY Empire State College Studio Art Program, New York, NY
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2013
Evidence, Gallery138, New York New York
2012
Rumination – Raw/Cooked, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY
2010
False Positive, Accentuating the Negative – Galerie Zidoun/Bossuyt, Luxembourg
Selected Work, Gallery at 1GAP, Brooklyn, New York
2007
Revered/Reviled, Curated by Isolde Brielmaier – Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2014
Black Eye curated by Nicola Vassell, Temp Space, New York, NY
2013
Present Tense Future Perfect Art, Basel Miami, curated by Teka Selman, Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami, Fl
Better Days, Mickalene Thomas, and Absolute Art Art, Basel, Basel Switzerland
Bronx Museum Biennial: Bronx Calling, Bronx, NY
2012
Midsummer Nights’ Dream – Gallery 138 – New York, NY
To Be Young Gifted and Black in the Age of Obama – Curated by Camille Ann Brewer,
Kentler International Drawing Center, Brooklyn, NY
Bigger Than Shadows – Curated by Ian Cofre and Rich Blint – Dodge Gallery, NY, NY
Ain’t Pressed – Reginald Ingraham Gallery – Los Angeles, CA
Configured – Curated by Teka Selman – Benrimon Contemporary Gallery, NY, NY
Cut Paste and Sew – An Armory Arts Week Event, Exhibition and Dialog – Gallery 138 – New York, NY
2011
The Black Portrait – Curated by Hank Willis Thomas, and Natasha Logan, Rush Gallery, NY, NY
2010
Wordless Curated by Felicity Hogan The Elizabeth Foundation, New York, NY
2009
High Visibility – Curated by Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York, NY
2008
Other Other, – Curated by Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Longwood Arts Gallery, Bronx Council on the Arts, Bronx, New York
Three Artists – Lisa Dent Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2007
DUMBO Art Festival – Curated by Felicity Hogan “Five Men” Performance DUMBO Arts Center, Brooklyn, NY
I Died For Beauty, Curated by Omar Lopez Chahoud, Newman Popiashvili, New York, NY
2006
Scarecrow, Curated by David Hunt – Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY
Out The Box: A Memphis Arts Production, Curated by Franklin Sirmans – SCOPE, New York, NY
2005
From the Artist’s Studio: ”Wish You Were Here” Curated by Franklin Sirmans, The Living Room, Art Basel, Miami, FL.
The Divine Body – Leroy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University – New York, NY
OTHER AMERICA – Exit Art, New York, NY
Continuum – Diesel Gallery – Brooklyn, NY
RESIDENCIES/HONORS
Fulbright Research Fellowship, Brasil, 2013
Artist in Residence Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Brasil 2013
Guest Lecturer, Universidade Federal da Bahia 2013
A.I.M. Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum Winter 2012
Drawing Center Viewing Program 2008
Gladiator School 2013, Video Installation
NY HIGHWAY, 2011, Live captured highway surveillance video clips – 06:30 loop