Between Life and Death (2023-2024)

Over the past year, I have lived with a collection of African objects—some new, some presumptively authentic, and some chosen purely for aesthetic concerns. Through this experience, I have spiritually reached a point where I feel our past lives reuniting. My current body of work, Between Life and Death, is a series of self-portraits, seascapes, and landscapes that visualize my spiritual practice of connecting to my ancestry. This collection, accompanied by my artistic practice, is my way of interacting with the past.  

Drawing upon research from 16th-century Bakongo cosmologies (otherwise lands I could’ve come from) I stage performances to construct, observe, and imagine my relationship to the objects in the images. Within the self-portraits, the theatrics of my performative actions are a method for engaging with my spirituality in solitude, keeping this private from my viewer, while still showing them my search for my family’s cosmic history—one that stretches beyond the confines of American documentation. 

I am hyperaware of the camera’s presence, as it is only constructing crafted visuals that merely capture the remnants of my spiritual search. In this sense, the camera becomes the historian distancing me from the documentation of my true works within the landscape; when the shutter is pressed, we are cosmoses apart. Ultimately, this work repositions my existence within the African continent, explores intuition as an ancestral concept, and questions the notion of time as a boundary separating past, present, and future.