UNIFIED MATTER, a Group Exhibition

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My Practice is an ongoing inquiry into the spiritual, political, and aesthetic dimensions of Black identity.  Through photography, textile, and sculptural work.  I examine the embodiment of memory and the Sacred, anchored in Senegalese traditions and my affiliation with the Baye Fall Sufi order.  I approach art-making as an act of spiritual harvesting-nurturing and transmitting cultural wisdom while reconfiguring the visual language of Black existence.  Themes such as migration, faith, and diasporic identity reoccure in my work.  At the core of my practice is an advocacy for visual literacy, love, and compassion as tools for building consciousness and cultural continuity, while exploring how cultural and spiritual practices are preserved, transformed, and expressed in new geographies.

My art practice, my purpose and my intention, revolves around my exploration, evaluation  and expanding perception of our environment and our interconnectedness to the multi-verse we inhabit.  I have always been fascinated with nature, science and our ever expanding comprehension of the laws of nature, as we discover more understanding of the universe as a whole.   As an example when String Theory was discovered, then the M-Theory, and the simultaneity of Multiple Universes.  

My mixed media sculptures are influenced and respond to these theories of interconnectedness.  Particularly, the Law of the Conservation of Energy, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed only transformed.  My inspiration stems from this truth that we are all co-creators of all that exists, everyone and everything consisting of that same matter, that energy, transforming and redefining ourselves and our multiverse.   The language in my artwork and in my life expresses our process of co-creation and co-existence as we share that same one breath, that same ONE MATTER.

Pressure, erosion, and marking making are all techniques I employ to create a visual language  in my paintings.  They feel alive to me, with endless possibilities for change and growth.  By layering, removing, scraping, and thickening of various materials and mediums, my methods, my processes are like that of an archaeologist, excavating, and exploring the canvases.  Surprised along the way by the reaction of the materials and the discovery of unique artifacts.  My artworks are a direct response to the world around me.  Driven by frustration, joy, courage, shame, fear, and a hundred other variables.  Each works have played a part in comforting or explaining something that I could not reconcile.