(this page is currently under construction) text / image works  Reading resides at the intersection of the personal and the social. As an artist who is also a poet, this intersection and the physicality of books and pages have long interested me. My works-on-paper interrogate the power of the page and the book by expressing, visually, the constructed nature of knowledge as well as the tensions between dominant historical narratives and personal/communal narratives often at the brink of erasure. Usually small, usually including text—old book pages, reproductions of historical documents, hand-written notes—my invented book pages, books, and sculpture re-enact or re-present the inevitable exclusions in authoring, documenting, and storytelling. The ruptures or places where the dominant narrative breaks down are made visual through acts of stapling, sewing, layering, peeling back, taping, and writing by hand. Attempts at identifying erasure are made by taking away integral book elements as well as elements that stabilize the experience of reading such as margins, clear typesetting, unobstructed words. By using multiple processes including photography, photocopying, printing, scanning, collaging, and re-printing, I attempt to re-create the visual markers we look for in something historical, that of signs of wear and tear, personal use, and distress. View artist's resume here. | small books  book sculptures  Seneca Village Series  The Fabric of America Series  The March of America Series  Critical White Studies  |
Visual Projects
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multi-media poems
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 "As the great poet Keorapetse Kgositsile put it, 'When the clouds clear / We shall know the colour of the sky.' When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets--no matter the medium--who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds. Or to put it another way, the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling." -from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley |