Through installations that interrogate the abilities of the photographic document, it’s my aim to reconstitute the histories of images and material into value systems of care and empathy. The imagery is a record of my geography, my neighbors, and my family. They are either housed in or made into objects that ask viewers to contemplate their physical orientation and reward curiosity and patience. And above all, they highlight practices of connection and respect to locales and communities.
 
In contemplating my relationship to others, it becomes difficult to demarcate where I end and another person begins. It’s within that blurring, I seek ways to define the self through others–exploring the edges of the photo document as the tool we use to index ourselves.
 
Originally planned as an expression of the inherited cycles that life in the inner city holds, the trajectory of “Tenacity” was redirected after a tumultuous 18 months of loss. It transformed into an ode to the lives of gone-too-soon-friends: Jabari Benton, Jonathan "Johnny Hash" Sandoval-Aleman, Millard "Pooter" Frazier Jr., and Olivia "Olee" Lee.
 
In each image, the families appear in the order of their loved ones’ deaths, bearing the cumulative weight of their shared history. They hold images of another family, a gesture to examine how grieving, while a personal experience, is also something we collectively endure. And in that gesture, my hope is that these images also offer comfort. The process was very much a collaborative one, where the relatives of the deceased chose where to honor their brother, son, sister, daughter, father. We gathered at the sites of life or sites of death with mementos of each loved one: an airbrushed tee shirt, flowers at a gravesite, recreating a cherished memory, or using a cardboard cutout from a funeral.
 
The series of images culminates in the mundane quotidian perspective of how we navigate life, a depiction of how our histories and its weight we carry, are relegated to the background against life's distractions.
 
Over the course of the five years of the project, a concern arose about the implications of the accessibility to the grief of my friends and the connotations in general of the relationship to Blackness and death. Embracing Glissant's concept concerning opacity, I deliberately destroyed my final prints by leaving them in water.
 
Water, holding spiritual significance, symbolizes birth, rebirth, and the preservation of memories. Its encounters with the prints release spirits, allowing them to shape the piece. Regardless of the gesture's meaning, the remains are now shared, offering glimpses into love, grief, and the limitations of documenting history. They prompt reflection on the significance of oral versus documented narratives in marking our temporal existence.
 
Ultimately these abstracted images are the only images meant to be seen, except in-person, where the originals reside on the opposite side. This gesture creates an environment where these bodies and stories in the images aren’t immediately available and can’t be passively viewed–they must be sought out, and reconciled with the abstracted gesture.

Through installations that interrogate the abilities of the photographic document, it’s my aim to reconstitute the histories of images and material into value systems of care and empathy. The imagery is a record of my geography, my neighbors, and my family. They are either housed in or made into objects that ask viewers to contemplate their physical orientation and reward curiosity and patience. And above all, they highlight practices of connection and respect to locales and communities.
 
In contemplating my relationship to others, it becomes difficult to demarcate where I end and another person begins. It’s within that blurring, I seek ways to define the self through others–exploring the edges of the photo document as the tool we use to index ourselves.
 
Originally planned as an expression of the inherited cycles that life in the inner city holds, the trajectory of “Tenacity” was redirected after a tumultuous 18 months of loss. It transformed into an ode to the lives of gone-too-soon-friends: Jabari Benton, Jonathan "Johnny Hash" Sandoval-Aleman, Millard "Pooter" Frazier Jr., and Olivia "Olee" Lee.
 
In each image, the families appear in the order of their loved ones’ deaths, bearing the cumulative weight of their shared history. They hold images of another family, a gesture to examine how grieving, while a personal experience, is also something we collectively endure. And in that gesture, my hope is that these images also offer comfort. The process was very much a collaborative one, where the relatives of the deceased chose where to honor their brother, son, sister, daughter, father. We gathered at the sites of life or sites of death with mementos of each loved one: an airbrushed tee shirt, flowers at a gravesite, recreating a cherished memory, or using a cardboard cutout from a funeral.
 
The series of images culminates in the mundane quotidian perspective of how we navigate life, a depiction of how our histories and its weight we carry, are relegated to the background against life's distractions.
 
Over the course of the five years of the project, a concern arose about the implications of the accessibility to the grief of my friends and the connotations in general of the relationship to Blackness and death. Embracing Glissant's concept concerning opacity, I deliberately destroyed my final prints by leaving them in water.
 
Water, holding spiritual significance, symbolizes birth, rebirth, and the preservation of memories. Its encounters with the prints release spirits, allowing them to shape the piece. Regardless of the gesture's meaning, the remains are now shared, offering glimpses into love, grief, and the limitations of documenting history. They prompt reflection on the significance of oral versus documented narratives in marking our temporal existence.
 
Ultimately these abstracted images are the only images meant to be seen, except in-person, where the originals reside on the opposite side. This gesture creates an environment where these bodies and stories in the images aren’t immediately available and can’t be passively viewed–they must be sought out, and reconciled with the abstracted gesture.