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“The internet is forever” was a phrase instilled in me growing up in the digital age, almost always as a warning. To me it sounded like a promise. The Internet was somewhere I could exist, immortalized, and craft who I wanted to become both on and offline.

My work draws upon my background in media theory and my interest in cultural, identity, futurist, and techno/cyber-feminist theories in order to expand how we think about the digital realm. I explore the possibilities of the internet as a space for research, placemaking, and constructing personal identity and embody these identities/places/ideas using photography, video, installation, and performance.

I am interested in simple functions of digital technology like file storage, message sending, and google searches, and use them to ask large existential questions. Who am I? Where am I? What does it mean to be here? I perform the acts of clicking through search results and digging through my personal virtual archives to find answers in the form of photos, texts, memes, and videos. Imagery of urban landscapes, trash, and construction materials are shown repeatedly in photos and videos establishing a setting that feels familiar but nondescript and absent of people or recognizable landmarks. This vague sense of a place visually represents a world that I am trying to escape to. There is no one around and I am safe to investigate, research, document, and explore. With the framework of worldbuilding in mind, I take screen recordings, audio recordings, live video feed, appropriated imagery, and physical tech objects and layer them in installations and performances. It becomes unclear which things being seen or heard are happening in realtime and which are pre recorded blurring the viewers perceptions of time and space, and demonstrating the entanglement of the “real” world and the online.

Living as a queer Black person under capitalism and white cis-heteropatriarchy means that much of my experience is dictated by a system of power that exists in opposition to my identity. By using my art practice as an experiment in building a world that is safe to escape to, I can take control of the system of context, meaning, and value that I am usually subject to and create my own. I allow the viewer inside of the spaces I create with the hope that they experience the disorientation of existing in a world they do not understand, witness my process of creating order and understanding for myself, and begin to question the boundaries of their own realities and experiences.