A Place on Earth (Manifest), 2022, Digital Photograph, 12 × 6 in
My work explores the throughlines between class, ancestry, place, environment, and labor. Embracing my role as a family archivist and community documentarian, I unearth histories that meld temporal and geographic boundaries. My work aims to marry form and content, using the media that best conveys each concept. With my multi-media installations, I have included plants, government documents, distorted advertising signage, and bricks from razed houses because objects hold power through memory and association. I photograph where my ancestors and I lived, to chart when the colonized became the colonizer, and where these identities blur and fall apart.
In everything that I create, I seek to turn the viewer into an active participant. I do this through my community-based practice or installations that ask you to move your body in a certain way to discover the hidden text in a piece, to take an offering of a vial of earth, or to listen to someone’s story about economic injustice and contribute your own.
Through my work, I ask the viewer to question their connection to where they live. Do you know the history of your city or neighborhood? Where do you fit in the junction of your own history, systems of power, and future-building? My goal is to crystallize the social inequities that I see around me—everything that's in opposition to community-based healing. By taking from my family’s lived experiences and my research about my home, my neighborhood, my city, and my country, I am left with uncomfortable observations about the human condition. Hauntology describes a future that cannot arrive, caught in a time loop of warped nostalgia. My work sits at the confluence of remembering/reliving pasts while enduring the hope and pain for better futures.
I am based in Salem, MA in the ancestral, contemporary, and unceded lands of the Naumkeag, Massachusett, and Pawtucket peoples. I endeavor to learn their stories and experiences, while unlearning the systems of white supremacy, colonization, and genocide that my ancestors, family, and myself benefitted from.