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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. 

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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.