Words on work…

The poetics of Blackness and queerness are centered in my approach to painting. Through a process of social abstraction, I explore multiple legibilities. What makes Blackness renderable, and to whom? And how do its edges shift? I am interested in reimagining abstraction as a site that can contain formations of race, sexuality, and gender. My visual field includes representations of Black women and femmes to locate readings of desire, and joy. Queerly imagined this unapologetic Black love can operate as subtle, coded, or demonstrative, depending on who is looking. My visual sensibility allows for an abstraction of form that may appear unfixed or becoming rather than stable and concrete—a queerness of possibility. Printed matter may disrupt, interfere with, or adorn an otherwise abstract painting. My compositional choices support visual motifs that create weight, openness, or disturbance within the painting's field. I am revising, countering, and inserting queer codes into art historical narratives. (Pink: such as lotions, creams, moisturizers, and rubs to care for and nurture, whether self-care or another's body.) I assemble color combinations to generate different results: symbolic (the red, black, and green of Black Nationalism), optical (a soft pink field holding a vibrating, lime-green circle), and pop-cultural (the cherry-red and pineapple-yellow of Starburst candies). I am curious about the space between Black cultural histories, color theories. and where repeated shapes allude to same-gender love. I am exploring the possibilities of color, form, Blackness, and queerness through abstraction.