Magazines like Ebony, Jet, Essence, and Black Enterprise had a certain sacredness in my household. For me, they were artifacts of Black American material culture. In my adolescence, I did not recognize their aesthetic and titular value as objects of socialization. As an adult, I realized that the content within these magazines were in part illusory and in part suggestive and did not reflect all parts of my identity.
As such, part of my process as an artist and visual anthropologist is to disrupt visual narratives that we are familiar with and create new ones. I do this by combining freehand drawing with photographs. I also use alternative photography methods like scanography and collage to create reconstructed images.
These materials and techniques enable me to shift or alter the focus for a viewer. My current work involves digitally scanning overlapping transparencies of Polaroids, film negatives, self-portraits, and photographs that I have taken and collected over the last three years. See my works in progress here.