Dreams, wishes, charms, hopes, fears, and beliefs are the themes around which my work revolves. I engage in a practice of speculative fiction, based in semiotic theory, that employs traumatic floating signifiers (religious symbols, secular figures, text, and found objects) to build storyscapes in the minds of viewers. Each piece is an exercise in collaborative, asynchronous storytelling.
Though clustered generally around the specific topic named in the title of a piece, symbols and their relations will be variously interpreted, depending on the narratives that the audience brings to the work. What the viewer takes away may be entirely unrelated to my intention, but it will have an internal logic that conforms to their own ideology or theology — a process that mirrors the human tendency to feel kinship or affinity for something which, in fact, one entirely misunderstands and misinterprets.
My approach is both strongly visual and cerebral. As a visual artist, my chief concerns are with color and composition and I’m heavily influenced by African American and Afro-Caribbean aesthetics, particularly in terms of contrasting colors and polyrhythmic patterns. As a theorist, I draw on semioticians like Umberto Eco and Roland Barthés, borrowing freely from Eco’s work on hyperreality and Barthés construction of polysemous discourse in a carnival environment.
