I began to create images that gave me perspective on where I stood in life, opening the doors to a practice committed to unraveling my understanding of how that traumatic experience still rests inside of me and is connected to histories of other brown bodies in America. I write, think, and wonder about living, trauma, and experience and how they intersect under the lenses of gender and race. Through experimental image-making, I create expressive languages for what feels like the unexplainable and omnipresent forces of the transformed presence of white supremacy. I use my body to engage in performative gestures and regain power and agency to act in retaliation against my history, or to understand my relationship with the histories of the land I walk that holds stories like mine.
 
Making images allows me to display the rawness of my ability to move through the day, or lack thereof, that wouldn’t normally be seen by the public. By bringing people into both my physical and psychological world of fatigue, hope, and depression as it exists in real-time, I can place my world in front of viewers. Turning the lens on myself became a way to show what it looks like for me—a non-binary, black, gay person—to have a newfound agency to define what a life worth living in-progress with so much to unpack can look like. In my practice of making images, it became important to show what happens when I stand in frame as not only an artist but also as an everyday black person who perpetually feels the collapse of their world.
 
I became interested in film because of its unpredictable nature, extensive process, and the riskiness that comes with working with such a sensitive medium. Most of my images are made using a 4x5 camera. There is no way to breeze through taking a photo when you only have a limited number of exposures. I began to love that film is prone to accidents and how these accidents can alter the image at any point in the process. Most of the scenes that come across as surreal or perplexing in my images occur on the negative. I embrace the use of crumby cable releases and lenses with faulty shutter openings because a lot of the effects translate well into the conceptualization of my images. I experiment with artificial and natural light, endurance, and repetition to imbue my work with a level of theatricality. It is important for me to shed light on the act of defying normativity in my everyday life. This is why I began photographing myself anywhere and everywhere. Maybe if I show how my body behaves, reacts, and expands at the visual cues of the white man and his country, people wouldn’t need to question the pain my black body is in and, instead, they would begin to understand what is causing the pain. Landscapes and institutions hold the histories of the violence enacted upon the brown bodies that have historically stewarded the land where my performances happen. Some of the images I make are a testament to my ability to counteract this violence while others are testaments to my ability to go against that history and display an act of nonconformity.

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