Artist Statement
A sweet rot. A slow burn. Charred rubber with a hint of lime. Salt in your saliva. Salt in your pussy. Salt in your eye. An aroma of burning tires. A smoky recollection. A second wind. A face tan. A night swim. Working in sculpture, poetry, video, and sound, my practice looks at ways cultural identities and inherited colonial structures transmit to the body and psyche by echoing and abstracting forms found in residential and commercial spaces. Part familiar, part foreign, the works employ an architectural vernacular – challenging systems of assimilation through material and analyzing systems of care through sculpture. As an interdisciplinary artist the many forms my works take do not fit in neatly definable boxes but rather actualize fluidly and in tandem with one another. A sculpture begins as a poem that then becomes a performance to later become a print that turns into an object. Employing metal as a drawing tool to address unseen systems and hidden forces at play in our day to day lives, the significance of iron and bronze in my work centers around gestures of recording as memory-tools and sites of recollection. Foregrounding my Haitian-American heritage as a way to speak to the complex and often messy negotiations one is expected to make as a bicultural person, my practice searches the intersection of belief, faith, and myth to address the ethos and rituals surrounding processes of care, memory, grief, and healing within the United States and the Caribbean.
