“Please describe your art practice” again.
I edited the hell out of my personal statement several months ago, with help from some of my favorite collaborators: Ifeanyi Awachie, Tochukwu Awachie, and WhimZee Hanna. I’m excited to draw from it for future fellowships and residencies, as it hits just about everything that excites me about art, and the art that only I can make. Thanks for reading!
My work is multifunctional in service to Black people of marginalized genders (Black MaGes). Within my theatre projects, I include video art that can exist independently in gallery spaces. In my video art, I include original music that can exist as a song cycle or album. Across these forms, I insist on making my work accessible to disabled audiences.
Primary themes of my work include home, ancestry, and Black, queer womanhood in America. In my solo show “You don’t climb a pepper tree, you go around it,” Nigerian Ankara cloth used as set dressing evokes the texture of home and heritage. Video projection of oil and food coloring creates the nauseating, viscous sensation of being consumed by white supremacy. In my video CUPCAKE, color correction and video filters create a soft and dizzying dreamlike setting.
As I develop my work, I research Black woman scholars and artists to support my arguments and stories. bell hooks’ Eating the Other discusses how racialized sexual experiences between white and nonwhite people can be seen as exiting the “norm” or “innocence” for white people to “enter the world of ‘experience’” (hooks, 368). In CUPCAKE, I pull from this text to explore how it feels as a Black woman to slowly realize that this is the main motivation for being pursued by a white partner. My video Visionboard, which loops found footage from my personal archive to create a collage of safety and comfort, was inspired by the artist E. Jane’s #MoodExercises. Both that series and her NOPE manifesto move beyond the simple question of Black representation and towards the needs, hopes, and dreams of Black people. Of course, no community is a monolith. Still, I am encouraged by the grains of similarity I find in the works of other Black artists I encounter and by how this research can strengthen the arguments and questions in my work.
My songwriting is a practice of generating unfinished impressions of the romantic, platonic, and familial relationships that a Black, queer woman in America experiences. A cappella vocals support the layered scoring of video pieces. Accompanied by guitar, they create a button for live performances. With a full band, they become an album. One of the most exciting and beautiful parts of becoming a songwriter is collaborating with composers and other musicians to discover the story that the instruments tell alongside the lyrics.
A large part of why I insist on creating projects that can exist in several forms is for the sake of accessibility. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I am working to expand my understanding of and relationship to disability, as well as commit to moving from ally to co-conspirator in service of my disabled community. Concretely, this looks like providing livestreams of my theatrical work for housebound folks; suggesting (if not requiring) masked performances; hosting selected video works on my website for free; and pushing for gallery seating for my work.
