I paint on found and fictional fragments of the homes in my neighborhood, working with discarded insulation, window screens, backboards, and debris netting. I’m interested in the afterlife of memory; in the ways that oral tradition is re-mediated in conditions of diaspora. I make paintings and installations as time capsules to hold, bury and connect.
I grew up behind a salvage yard comprised of remains from Black neighborhoods destroyed en masse through urban renewal. After each wave of demolition, Mr. Jones - a sort of home-grown architect - would recover components of condemned houses to help displaced families rebuild. Because of this practice, the homes in my community up are made of other homes, and they refuse to be one place.
I’ve been engaging window screens as accretion disks. They move. They fall inward. They receive and exhale experience. They chronicle latent passages of windows lost and found. In the studio, material gathers slowly along the screen lattice. Images accrue. Memories trickle into being. Presences and voids in the mesh overwhelm Euclidean space as the open cloth, whenever left to its own devices, is eager to depart from the graphable plane.
The screens disclose some things and hold others close: passages, named and stray recollections, personal experiences, omen. I soak, graft, patch, piece, stitch, and reassemble them to remember things that cannot be known. Along sequences of meldings and departure, the mesh cuttings impress experience onto one another. And in separation, substances and absences of their histories are continually recalled.
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