A sketch for a concept tentatively called Space is the Place (2012).
Wonderwall (2012) Maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me.
Thank you, James Brown, for helping me to figure out what to do with this work, Torch Song (2012). I made a bunch of these images with different words. I haven’t figured out what to do with the rest, but I’m pleased with how the pleases work together.
Puro Teatro (2012) is finally complete. This performance/video is dedicated to my abuela and to a country I’ve never seen, Cuba. I’m happy to share with you this labor of love.
My Poems from 10 Years Ago
Most people who’ve met me over the past few years don’t know how much I was into poetry about a decade ago. I just re-read some of these and thought to share. It seems I was always invested in themes of culture, spirituality, mysticism, and romance in my work even then.
2/26/2002
faithless tongue
on days when the sky is a diamond
and the wind burns like dust in my eyes
i remember the way he
let love slip from his lips
as if it never moved mountains
or ended lives
but the pauses in between his words
were always just long enough
to make me question the tongue he spoke in
he was fluent in promises that keep hearts
from drifting into another promised land
so i stayed
and awaited the arrival of more triumphs on his part
to make love real
but that day never came
and it was not the wind
nor the glaring diamond sky
that made soft stings in my eyes
teardrops fled across my mouth
to lay lifeless on the floor
bitter
ashamed to touch the tongue that
could not know his faithless language
because even in their death
i blessed him
9/23/2004
astrology
prophetic words in unlikely places.
once galaxies away,
now they make a landing
when i’m trying to sleep.
so stealthy they creep under my eyelashes
into memories of sun ra spaces,
saturnian wings and the sweet gold time.
last time i wore a dress made of stars.
fiery and distant i became until i
blamed the night silk for
alienating me.
i live above everyone else.
the planets and their moons
hang high for you
while they decorate my pool
of lazy nights.
i swim in a remembrance haze.
3/8/2004
abuela
ey mama eyeyey mama
pink-red lips, jeweled finger-
nails y agua de rosa scented hair.
her favorite color wasn’t
in the rainbow. a color of existence
smeared on cheeks with lovers’
and mothers’ blood. she told me this
en una rumba simple, in a slow
honey
step.
these are veins. we
are vain, so near, yet
so foreign como cuba
like hearts. we are sacred
builders, the planks our
hands and spines.
y por eso, mi ‘ja, oh we know
how to straighten the crooked.
whiten the too-darks. carve
proper breasts and noses.
put on, make up, and smile.
silence the voices. perfectly
align vertebrae by vertebrae.
so they’ll never know that
they sway and rock upon
such fragile bridges while
el mundo abusó. it abused
sacó provecho de todas. abusó.
abused all the saints, maría y
magdalena. yemaya y ochun.
as God watched. so we wear
the truth like a gold ring. this
is no time to swaddle in catholic
convenience. they all know.
we just make them confess.
we will have what’s ours
and burn those bridges
so that no one will ever
walk on them again.
These are stills from an updated version of the Puro Teatro performance for video, where I began by exploring the roles of ritual and religion in art. The project has morphed considerably, and over the next few months I hope to develop it further and upload it in its entirety. Right now, the performance has taken a turn, since the ritual has become more personal to me, instead of just engaging in a kitschy commentary on the persona of La Lupe and Afro-syncretic religions to which I have no real life connection. It’s now the first in a series of performative practices that establish my space as private, public, sacred, healing, etc.
The next step for me is to create multiple dimensions of space with a backing track of La Lupe singing this song. How I edit this will emulate how we experience sounds within, say, the walls of a small apartment in a big city, which, for transient, solitary folks like myself, never feels like a real home. Thus, this has begun to develop into the crafting of a sacred space for me on a very personal level, something which I cannot say I’ve done since moving to Chicago.
Just the Music (2012)
Bananas are loaded with many meanings, as exemplified by Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and her persona in general: sexual, slapstick, exotic. La Revue Nègre (2012) attempts to embody these things without using the body.
The Power of Context
For the past few months, I’ve been on the host committee for an event at the Art Institute of Chicago with Mickalene Thomas, which happened last Friday. On Thursday, Thomas generously gave her time to my student group Black at SAIC for a roundtable discussion, and we generated a rewarding dialogue with students that continued to buzz around school. Her work’s relationship to art history (that of male modernist painters such as Manet and Courbet) and to her personal background (her models are black women such as her mother, her friends and herself) is incredibly vital to understanding her work, which brought up the subject of the power of context (physical, historical, social) in art.
I’m compelled to define a historical context for my own work because I have no control over the viewers’ interpretation of the work and often the physical context in which it’s shown. For me, showing work in art school (the context of a place) where many of my colleagues haven’t given much consideration to racial identity and the representation of the black body (the context of a history), I sometimes struggle with whether or not to show certain work at all. This isn’t something that I think will every be properly resolved anywhere I go, no matter the background/interests of the viewers, so this is an area ripe for conversation that I want to explore further in my work.
What struck me the most about the two events (the student luncheon and the artist talk) is that we ran over time at the student event by almost a half hour due to the fruitful discussion, whereas the museum talk only one person asked a question during the Q&A portion. I found that to be an interesting display of the power of context as well, as it relates to making and talking about art.
I’m really getting into this concept of interrogating the role of religion and ritual in art. More and more I find myself intrigued by ritual as a type of theater. I just completed a performance where I created a sort of shrine of questionable purpose and effect. We’ll see where this goes. This particular piece is called Puro Teatro (2011).
This series of photographs is a study on hands inspired by the exaggerated hand movements of Baroque and classical religious paintings. The combination of the rosary and the Spanish language tattoo could have been loosely influenced by popular images of religious identity in Latino culture. Such things I’ve experienced throughout my life have a way of surfacing when making new work.
This video explores cultural and familial expectations and how those relate to what bell hooks called “the oppositional gaze” of black female spectators. I am on the left, and my mother is on the right. The soundtrack is Big Sean’s song “Dance (Ass)”…and yes, it was fully intentional that the video shows not a single derriere. The password is gaze2011.
Since the links appear to be more glitchy than not, I’m including more screenshots of the BlackPlanet project.
Screenshots of BlackPlanet: I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU TO SEE ME for those of you that don’t have Safari or a Mac.
BlackPlanet: I CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU TO SEE ME
I created a web art/glitch site with profile photos I posted on BlackPlanet and other social networking sites from 2000-2009. Warning: The site is both intentionally and unintentionally glitchy and formatted for the Safari browser. The crude images are “kitsch” because they lack irony - I was completely sincere and emotionally invested in the creation of these web personae when I first discovered Photoshop. I think glitching can refer aesthetically to how our identity on the web is perceived by others and also to the distortion in our perception of our own digital “bodies.”
