“Please describe your art practice.”
When I’m not stressing myself into panic attacks about my career, I actually really enjoy thinking about my practice and how it’s progressing. I started working on this prompt in an attempt to apply for Mitu’s Hybrid Art and Technology residency, following an outline from Caterina Maina Photography’s blog post. It’s a rough draft and will eventually be under 500 words, but it’s detailed and I think I hit every aspect. Give it a read and let me know what you think. And check out the linked blog if you need help drafting your own!
As an artist, I’m excited by texture. Whether working in live performance or video, I find focusing on the texture of set pieces, lighting, practical effects, and more can expand the emotions I hope to convey. An embroidered Ankara cloth is safe and homey, a bowl of vegetable oil with pockets of water and food coloring is cold and dizzying.
When I begin a project, the texture and emotion of an idea encourage me to free-write, usually by hand, and then start research. This includes academic writing and visiting museums to support and iron out my own thoughts. While working on my thesis at Sarah Lawrence College, I read Black feminist texts like bell hooks’ Eating the Other and dug through E. Jane’s social media. These accounts of Black women surviving white supremacy and short-form videos about quotidian Black life helped cement the foundation of my project.
After I brainstorm, I create rough storyboard sketches. This is necessary for video production, as it organizes my thoughts and requires that I have an idea of the entire project. I also shoot video of striking compositions that I come across, whether my storyboarding is finished or not. This can be natural landscapes or manmade structures, usually with an element of lighting beyond my expertise to recreate. Reviewing this found footage helps to connect different ideas or arguments that are at the center of a specific work, even if it doesn’t end up in the final product.
My ideas come from both personal and larger cultural experiences. Much of my work focuses on my lived experience as a Black, queer woman in America navigating romantic, platonic, and familial relationships. Though no community is a monolith, I am consistently encouraged by the grains of similarity that I feel in the works of other Black artists I come across and how this research can strengthen the arguments and questions in my work.
As an actor and filmmaker, my primary tools are my body, my iPhone, and a digital camera. As I develop my free-writing into dialogue and voice-over, I find it necessary to get pieces up on their feet in a performance space to clarify story arcs and connect emotional beats. I always have my phone with me over the course of my day, so I’m easily able to record video as well as jot down questions and realizations pertaining to various projects. Though I enjoy using a DSLR, tripod, and Zoom recorder for planned shoots, I’m very happy with the video quality and stability when using my phone handheld, and the audio quality with or without a lav mic.
I also regularly use green screens in my work and edit using Final Cut Pro. I’ve recently worked on a sci-fi play and created experimental work, so green screens are a simple way to achieve special effects. I look forward to learning how to achieve more ambitious effects more quickly, and that may start with expanding my knowledge of software. Though Final Cut is no longer the industry standard, I have plenty of experience with it and can edit more quickly under deadline. I’d like to update my editing software knowledge, so I plan to begin practicing with Davinci Resolve (which is free!), and eventually Adobe Premiere.
In addition to acting and filmmaking, I’ve begun a songwriting practice. I don’t currently play any instruments, but I explored music composition during my MFA program. I learned that, in addition to maintaining a habit of songwriting, you don’t necessarily need to play an instrument proficiently to begin composing work. As I slowly practice the guitar, I look forward to connecting with musicians to help produce demos of my work. I’d also like to eventually use my music to score my theatre and video projects. Until then, songwriting has become an effective method of creation for me, as a practice of being okay with an unfinished product, and surprisingly therapeutic.
I would describe the work I create as multifunctional and in service to Black MaGes. My theatre projects, most notably “You don’t climb a pepper tree, you go around it” includes video art that can both exist within live performance and independently in gallery spaces. These gallery spaces can be in person with plenty of accessible seating, and virtually for audiences who need to remain at home. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the dangers that still exist, I hope to find more ways to make my work accessible for myself and other disabled people.
As for the subject of my independent projects, I focus on the idea of home, ancestry, and Black queer womanhood in America. What this looks like lately is more experimental work, exploring how it feels to be consumed by whiteness and white supremacy. There’s plenty of green screen and editing that results in dreamlike settings. I’m hoping to move towards pieces that focus even more on the interiority of Black and queer relationships, decentering whiteness and the experience of misogynoir. I’m excited to combine these projects with my original music in a concert staging with video projection and interludes.
