My work spans painting, drawing, collage, and installation in an interdisciplinary practice that uses perceptual and spatial manipulation to rethink formalist histories rooted in universality. I aim to uncover both the ahistorical grounds of painting and the potential for its progress through a disoriented engagement with space by way of the Spiritual. Oftentimes, notions of the Spirit present themselves through various depictions of my shadow, uses of gradation as potential sources of transcendence, and "subterranean" conceptions of engaging with space. My approach is grounded in Black feminist scholarship, queer and critical race theory, and queer-of-color critiques that emphasize lived experience, interdisciplinary epistemologies, and metaphysical conceptions of nonlinear space-time relations as methods for opposing white patriarchal systems of reasoning.
José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of “disidentification,” has helped me to orient, or disorient, my affinities and aversions to the history of painting. Through a disidentifying embodiment, I examine how formalist disciplinary teachings made popular during the mid-20th century, specifically within the study of the Bauhaus philosophy of design, have led to formations of mourning within its disciplines that, I’d argue, parallel origins of mourning within studies of race, gender, and sexuality. It reinforces my fascination with the subject and also functions as the origin to this circuit of fraught desires.