My work investigates social identity through exploration of the body and attempts to understand how my role, as a young Black woman, functions within any given environment. I am interested in interpreting the body as a spectacle and the relationship of the gaze between myself, as an artist, and my viewers. Currently, through performance I am exploring my identity as a “sexually attractive being” and how this newly observed identity has served purpose in my community. Rather than just limiting myself to generalization, categorization, or stereotype, I am devoted to creating art from personal experience. Public response, outside of the institution, has also been essential to my practice because it has allowed for me to more accurately develop an assessment of the content in my work. Here, I have been able to conduct series of experiments such as laying my vulnerable body passive aggressively in areas that contain high traffic and diverse groups of people like sidewalks, parks, and storefronts of downtown Chicago for several hours at a time.
As my transition from childhood to womanhood has been challenging, confronting my sexuality and the consistent un-consented exploitation and objectification that I have experienced has led me to reconsider and reexamine the way I perceive my environment. While this recognition has given me fresh material to work with, it also has not fallen short of revealing to me the ugliness that comes with being Black and being a woman.
