2016 Womanifesto
The beings in my work are unequivocally and emphatically black.
Black is the complete absorption of light.
Black absorbs sun light. We are filled with the sun. We are light.
Through African mythic reclamation and exploration I aim to visualize the spiritual authority of patakis to create a conflated representation of my idea of black identity not soley rooted in the tragic dissolution of African descended peoples presence in America.
For I believe in Yah. Through faith in Him. He gave me the authority to use his name, so that which I bind on earth is bound in heaven. Intention is everything. I am complete in Him who is the most generous and genius creator; He whose power ordains all. Any act of creation done with his blessing is pure. I am indeed the creation because I have poured it from myself. Creating is his gift. Herein expression is precious and thereby inherently beautiful.
The artist’s function is the mythologization of humanity and nature. God is not separate from nature. Humanity is born of nature in both evolution theory and creationism.
Define Humanity? There is no maturation without accepting the inevitability of change and ones inability to ever prepare for said change. There is no maturation without learning how to die. If we as humans live in the world of denial, we will live in enduring spiritual malnutrition. It is nothing but an illusion to believe one will never see the day of reckoning. If there had been a different reaction to The Great and Perpetual American Terrorism against blacks, there would have been a civil war every generation! We were detached from our roots and our foundations were severed.
Yet, what other culture has been beaten, belittled, forgotten and incessantly mistreated and still given the world some of the most recognizable (and ceaselessly copied) ideals about love, beauty and culture?
I lost my culture.
I lost a whole language.
I lost my religion.
I lost it all in the fire that is westernization.
So here I am
Too foreign for home,
Too foreign for here,
Never enough for both.
Trying to piece together what is (temporarily) unknown.
Trying to understand my black body, my black femininity and spirituality despite external interpretations.
I am unhappy with the current narrative therefore I am resituating value through paintings, performance and sculpture to perhaps solve these frustrations and provide a more whole narrative.
The metaphysical reality of life is the unity of all life. Our bodies are subject to time, and everything in the field of time is dual; being and non-being, dark and light, dead and alive, male and female etc. For Yah all things are good, for us only there is duality. We are displaced on opposite ends of the pendulum searching without for the moratorium of equilibrium divinity possess. Which is often (almost always) found in death. Which we fear.
We are looking for that which transcends us among us. Luckily others have undertaken these journeys cross culturally before us. My artwork is an effort to exhume from the past for present use these symbols and teachings as a guide to the revolutionary act of exposing my reason for being, and giving it language.
I look to myths, specifically those of The Yoruban, Akan, and Christian religions to create much of the narrative in my work. Currently the emphasis is placed on the woman because women carry the marks and nuances of their culture more then the male. Anything despised or desired is placed on the female body.
Where there is woman there is magic.
Woman is the consort of the spirits.
"But being alive, and being a woman and being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet." - Ntozake Shange
The truth of these things is hidden in a dark world where our whole spirit resides. As I learn how to give language by making to these previously formless possibilities I give structure to a quality of being rooted in feeling. As Audrey Lorde illuminates in Poertry Is Not A Luxury, “This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me.’” A constant self-revelation rooted in blackness, womanhood, and spirituality, but not constrained by it.