In My work, cardboard boxes represent both public and private spaces. They become a vehicle for silent visual protest. In plain sight, as a plain sight. My muted color palette, punctuated by loud flashes of innocent blue or guilty red mirrors a conversation between high and low, denial and acceptance, blackness and whiteness. Painters often use masking tape, to “mask out” certain areas of a painting. In my work, masking tape suggests both neglect and repair. By using these materials, I attempt to represent what happens to the psyches and images of African Americans in the educational system, in the media, and on the street itself. They are thrown away, and made silent, treated like garbage. The unresolved, even disorganized nature of my work creates a defensive field in which the eye is called upon to judge perceptions of worthlessness and unconventional notions of beauty. If black men are seen as temporary, like I truly feel we are, my work is a complete gestation of this reality, and its expression in visual and material form.
