My work is concerned with issues of place and representation, more specifically the dubious nature of home and belonging for African Americans in the Southern US. Figures are depicted with backs turned, in extremely low light, or backlit so the details of their appearance are cast in shadow. This approach was largely influenced by Édouard Glissant’s essay “Right to Opacity,” in which he argues marginalized bodies do not need to explicate themselves to validate their humanity, and that the context of Western globalism is not a space capable of fully understanding them in the first place.

This work has been made in conjunction with a body of “landscape portraits” that depict “semi-indigenous” plants of Southern Louisiana. The plants are central to the area’s culture but are not actually native species. Their presence is meant to act as an allegory for colonization and the migration of bodies across the Atlantic, and how this history is still visible in the mundane viewing of nature.