Content Warning: Noose, Nudity
The afterlife of slavery creates a world where marginality for black people becomes hyperactive; the body then becomes an allegorical site that contemplates what it means to be oppressed through the inheritance of a racialized physical landscape. Within the series, A Dead Name that Learned How to Live, through large format photography, performance art, and 3D anatomical sculptures, I create a world where these manifestations fight to subvert the European colonial understandings of Myles Golden. In this breadth of work, I explore what it means to be black, both as an antithesis to whiteness, as well as liberalized constructions of identity: the categorization of race and gender as a marking of access. Reconstructing language visually, spatially, and linguistically, this project centralizes blackness as a gender, ethnical, sexual, and geographical identity. These photographs act as evidence of my fight for black liberation; battling both exterior and interior subjugation through a dislocated framework that is the history of America. Presenting itself within the black body, within the black mind, inside the black soul; black becomes its own realm of selfhood that cannot be contained within the framework of whiteness.
