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My practice is rooted in the art and documentary traditions of the South and draws upon my background in media theory. I look at cultural, identity, afrofuturist, and cyber-feminist theories as foundations in my work to question what we think about reality and the digital realm. I explore the possibilities of worldbuilding and digital technology as vessels for research, placemaking, and constructing personal identity. I then embody these worlds/identities/places/ideas using photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance.

In my most recent work I have been exploring themes of displacement, gentrification, and human relationships to land. I document the often overlooked ephemera of construction like trash, unused materials, and abandoned machinery in an effort to reveal narratives and histories of land and the people who live on it. The materials are so common they become universal symbols of change. Construction sites become liminal, serving as portals that reach beyond their physical boundaries to connect parallel narratives of placemaking and displacement among Black communities in different regions. Through my documentation I hope to reframe ideas surrounding “development”, or what is considered progress, and capture places in a state of transformation before they are entirely seized by forces of capital. I see this as an act of reclaiming space through the imagination and granting infinite possibility for what they might become.

In my previous work I was interested in simple functions of digital technology (like file storage or google searches) and their physical containers (like computers or TVs) and used them to ask large existential questions. Who am I? Where am I? What does it mean to be here? In my video work I used screen recordings set on my personal desktop to dig through archives of tik toks, youtube videos, memes, and photos in search of answers, much like I did as a child in the late 2000s. With the framework of worldbuilding in mind, I layered screen/audio recordings, live video feeds, and physical tech objects in sculptural installations and performances. I aimed to distort which elements were present in realtime and which were pre-recorded in order to blur the viewers' perceptions of time and space, and to demonstrate the entanglement of the “real” world and the online.

Growing up as a queer kid in the Internet age, my process of self-discovery and exploration of the world around me was inextricably tied to my access to online spaces. From anonymous chat rooms, to Tumblr blogs and online RPGs, digital technology offered boundless opportunities to invent and reinvent myself.

Now, 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. I am interested in channeling the spirit of reinvention and radical imagination that I found online into my work. 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 to gaze into my interior spaces with the hope that they witness my process of creating order and understanding for myself, and begin to question the boundaries of their own realities and experiences to create the world they hope to live in.