i guess it's kind of like holding your breath under water sometimes you have to come up for air
when i first moved to new york nyu would throw out about 90 to 100 stretchers that students
would leave behind and i would grab them out of the dumpster and take them home and rip
the paintings off and just start restretching them and i would paint obsessively from like 5
30 in the morning to 11 at night every day and ever since i'm just trying to become
i guess more expansive as a person and as an artist and just continue to develop
growing up with a single mom and both through my mom and dad are in and out
of incarceration growing up moving around america living with friends living in my car
kind of destined to fail and the statistics would show that to be true i took that very
seriously and like i knew that i couldn't fail and i knew that i couldn't give up
so the need to really prove everyone wrong was a big chip i still have on my shoulder
when i first started painting it was on receipts at starbucks in high school
that was my first job i was working there as a barista and i'd make these doodles with
my pencil and kind of smudge espresso on it not really think anything of it
once i started to really consider what coffee meant to me i got emotional i started to think
about seeds coming from africa brewing in this hot water and transcending into something else
the labor realities of this agrarian beverage and coffee staining cotton was really interesting
conceptually partly because i couldn't look at the cotton of the canvas without seeing its origin
hood without seeing white without seeing history and i guess this kind of american historical canon
so i was like all right i'm going to take this black coffee and stain the whiteness as a way
to question these ideas and think about use in a more authentic and personal way
the proximity to whiteness has benefited me in many ways so i wanted those complications
to be in the work i'm looking at painting in portraiture as way to interrogate biraciality
questioning stereotypes and complicated head spaces of unlearning so in my work i'm looking
at the nose i'm looking at the lips parts of the crotch some of the subjects in ways
in which you can actually be a reflection of the viewer and kind of interrogate themselves
i think a lot about the intricate moments of being a kid the dichotomy of being one of the
light-skinned kids the first 13 years of my life than being one of the only black kids the last
15 or so years of my life i mean essentially what i'm saying is i'm very familiar with
operating between these fixed identities and living this kind of realized dichotomy of both
the street for me was this university like i found the street as this kind of free liberating space
that didn't have rules and i would just set up these walking road maps like 10 15 miles a day i
was just going out in the world with my camera and i just let it act as a compass through shooting
film i fell in love with portraiture humanity and for me and seeing people eye to eye it was kind
of about just seeing their soul seeing a bit of myself my family and just letting someone be them
i think there's a tenacity that bleeds into the work that comes from considering nuance the
necessity to specify my fragmentation blackness is not monolithic so i'm just me and my life so
far is what i'm trying to share and how i feel and that emotional spectrum is really all i can give
honestly the show at clearing is my first solo show in new york it's been a lot of late nights
and early mornings and just kind of cried and bled all over it especially the last 13 months
and the timing the realities personal life things hypervisibility and just blackness
in general this show is a lot of things it's a very emotional tie of so many feelings highs
and lows and making sure that i'm just making something honest keep it moving
keep developing and keep researching and just keep praying to the church of art
you