IN MY OWN IMAGES

Fruits De La Mer/e (Fruits From The Ocean/Mother) is an interactive performance installation reckoning with the ancestral waters of life and their healing power. Water is sacred to Black people, for its ability to enact reflection and renewal, it is a source of spiritual consciousness reminding us of all we’ve preserved and inherited throughout our various historical migrations. It is a site where life crosses path with death, symbolized by our ancestors taking shelters in the waters of the womb to build anew. Through this performance I honored both the immediate and distant family lost at sea by directly confronting my fear of the ocean. I connected back to the ancestral waters of Orisha Yemaya/Olokun by using videos of the sun setting on the The Nile River as blueprint while fabricating the work. Alice Coltrane’s song “Isis and Osiris” brought new spiritual dimension to the sculpture as I began to reference of the greatest love stories that took place along one of my birthplace’s most abundant creations. Through Isis’ quest to reconnect with her long lost lover Osiris, I locate the liminal feelings of joy I hope to cultivate in the healing gestures through the performances I facilitate with Black trans and Black fems bodies. I use the symbols of the contained two flames, folks gazing into the mirror as I gaze at them, the sharing of jasmine oil (essence of spiritual love) and moments of holding hands while jumping gleefully to suggest this deep cosmic kinship. The poem that I perform in the video is written about my mother "Alice."

Marcelline: In My Own Images, 2015 is a single channel video that explores the hypervisible and ambiguous artist's body as a primal site of protest. Ideas found in Audre Lorde's seminal text "Uses of The Erotic: The Erotic As Power; the Baltimore uprising in the spring of 2015 and the non-linear history of transgender/gender-variant people are used as a framework to situate the piece. Filmed intimately with an iphone 6 between Philadelphia and Baltimore, the 14 distinct vignettes double as documentation of the protagonist' action based iconography in reference to their interactive live performances. In the video, the chaos of freedom and solitude become synonymous with one another as the weight of an audience is rendered into vacant galleries and empty baseball fields, spaces where one typically witnesses a spectacle. The resulting cycles of object mediated transformations depict the artist's ability to transcend beyond physical space into the meta-spiritual realm, into the feminine void. A knife welded into the shape of lips, a red trench coat constructed from a pattern of only curved lines, some of the objects she employs in a dynamic way during live performances, are used to dictate some of the transitions and progressions of the non linear narrative. In one scene she runs into the field while holding a heart shaped strawberry cast in rubber, in the next the strawberry heart glows fiery on a light stand carefully placed in front of her chest. She then cuts and rubs a lemon onto the surface of the heart, as a symbolic reference to her holistic healing practice, in effort to become whole.