RMB Manifesta
My various modes of
being are impermanent, as they exist within overlapping communities, social
constructs, and constant paradigm shifts. I seek to come to terms with these
modes and a longing for a centered sense of being. The tools I use to transcend
my displacement (i.e. computers, avatars, cameras) are directly linked to other
people and multiple histories, thereby problematizing the complete autonomy the
tools intend to evoke.
In my work as a
photographer, performer, and cultural theorist, I mash-up familiar icons and
personae, disorienting myself from a conventional experience to them as a
passive consumer. Engaging the
visual language of mass media, I remove the environment, leaving only the
represented body and the constructed image as the spaces to reconfigure the
assumed signifiers of authenticity. I fight and clamor for the camera’s gaze in
an intensely meticulous process that involves creating everything from a placeless,
timeless stage.
Through still lifes
of books, album covers, and other mass-produced objects, I attempt to repurpose
visual metaphors for construction and identity manipulation. The architectonic forms in the still
lifes become collages that distort and complicate the narratives of those who attempted
to subvert oppressive paradigms, only to be reabsorbed back into them. These
narratives are vital to my process of creating my own mythology, not suffering
through trends of cultural consumption but fostering an oppositional gaze. With
each meticulously displayed gesture, I ritualize my privilege to move this way.
Putting them on display in a white cube is simply never enough, and the
challenge resides in figuring out what measure of resistance is the grain of
radical potential.
Following this same
focus in my performance and video work, I embody what I call a “contemporary
freemason,” a culturally syncretic trickster who possesses skill in repurposing
symbolic meaning. Depicting
multiple roles of jester, servant, master, and creator, the self-portraits and
performances intentionally reassign modes of representation as sites of
resistance and choice. There is a tension between constructed fantasies and
self-reflection.
By exploring the
overlap between the performed and the personal, I attempt to recover a sense of
agency in my own representation. I
choose to be seen through a surreal multi-conscious lens or not at all; this
emphasis on self-control will inevitably be challenged and therein lies its
power. I present the black female
body as a conduit to empty, fill, freeze, animate, construct, and destruct
culture, even while serving as a surface upon which to project mysterious
desire.
No longer the
subaltern or the abject, the intact black female body dominates as the vehicle
through which the possibilities of self-determination and multi-consciousness
manifest. The dilemma of double-consciousness will be damned.
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