(light orchestral music) (audience chattering) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) (audience cheering) (audience applauding) - I feel like I recognized that holler a while ago.

I think I know who that is.

All right.

It's a pleasure to be here.

It really feels surreal to be back.

And, you know, this lecture series, I've always had very fond memories of it, and it was very informative in my education here at Stamps.

So it's a real honor to be here to present to you all.

So let's jump into it.

There's a lot of slides.

I'm not gonna be talking about everything in depth, but yeah, let's have some fun.

So I'm gonna start off with this quote from Stuart Hall, who is a Jamaican-born British cultural theorist.

And it says, "An archive may be largely about the past, but it always rereads in light of the present and the future."

So you've heard a really wonderful, concise overview of my practice.

So you understand how I'm thinking about the archive.

So the questions that I'm bringing to it are thus.

How might we understand our body as a breach to the seemingly rigid contours of the archive?

How might the body interrupt, activate, or transform what the archive contains?

And how can painting offer a new mode of engaging with the archive, one that unsettles the traditional relationships between the viewer and object, positioning the body not simply as a spectator, but as a participant in the production of meaning?

All right.

So I'm starting us off here with the work I actually applied to Stamps with.

And this work is on view at the gallery.

One of the reasons I wanted to start with this is, you know, this work, what you're seeing here are images, a documentation of a performance in which I'm donning on my, at the time, recently deceased father's ties.

And at the time I didn't have the language to articulate, okay, I'm dealing with a personal archive and all of this stuff.

It was more of an impulse to engage with these charged materials.

But there's been a through line in the practice in which I'm looking at materials and thinking of archives in a very broad sense.

So whether it's archives in its traditional sense, in terms of going into an institution, into catacombs, and poring through documents or heirlooms like ties and other objects that have history embedded with them.

I've always been engaging that in some sort.

So I've structured this talk around three sections.

So the first section is "Threshold," thinking of the archive as both threshold and site for disturbance.

The first piece here is called "The Fire Next Time," and it alludes to James Baldwin's book of essays, "The Fire Next Time," published in 1963 about race and religion in the United States.

What you're actually looking at, though, is a reformulated image of the 1981 Black protest in London, oftentimes referred to as the Brixton riots.

So the development of these beady curtains really ushered a new stage in my practice, and they were inspired by the bamboo curtains that I would find in a few Caribbean homes.

In this current configuration, they occupy a space between painting, sculpture, architecture, functioning simultaneously as image and threshold.

So viewers have to pass through it to get to the rest of the exhibition, momentarily disrupting the legibility of the image.

The archive therefore cannot remain fixed.

It's continuously altered through the viewer's movement.

And this encounter, the body's no longer positioned simply as receptor of the work, but I'm enlisting you as an agent to disrupt and transform the archive with me.

I also want to note that this work was fabricated in partnership with HEKLER, an artist-run platform and transnational community that fosters critical and experimental engagement around hospitality and conflict.

Of particular note are the founders.

So Natasa Prljevic and Joshua Nierodzinski are also alumnis of Penny Stamps School.

They were in the same class as me.

So this was a wonderful opportunity to work with them and also Jelena Prljevic.

All right, so "The Fire Next Time."

One of the things that fascinated me about this image and, you know, as I was doing research for it, what really informed me was this essay by Eddie Chambers called "Through the Wire: Black British People and the Riot."

And in it, he talks about how the proliferation of images, proliferation of images of protests inform our understanding of said protests, but you have to consider the artistic framing and the journalistic contextualization of the work.

And oftentimes these operate in this kind of anti-Blackness.

So it reframes and obscures the issues at hand, and it's always framed as sort of a nuisance to society.

And I wanted to find some way to push up against that.

Another thing that I found particularly interesting about the image, right, is that the photographer for this image chose to not include their name.

And this was a common practice around that time.

So there's an embedded tension within this image where the photographer and the protestors both need a certain level of anonymity in order to operate within this landscape.

So, you know, that was something else that compelled me towards this image.

All right.

All right, so the next image here is called "You Are in the Burning Car Beneath the Highway."

And that title comes from the first line from a poem.

And the title of the poem is "For Black Children at the End of the World and at the Beginning."

So again, this is another image from the Brixton riots.

It was around the same time that I'm making, you know, "The Fire Next Time."

But in the midst of making this drawing, a young man named Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed in Atlanta.

At this point, I'm living in Atlanta.

I'm working in Atlanta.

A young man named Rayshard Brooks was shot by a police officer.

He fell asleep in a parked car at a Wendy's and was shot.

Initially, my intention was to crop the drawing, and instinctively I started just writing in the margins, and my neighborhood was close to the CNN Center.

As protests erupted, the National Guard was deployed.

My studio/live workspace became in the mix.

And, you know, there were nights where I couldn't even sleep because there's helicopters overhead and all of this stuff.

All my thoughts get annotated and scribbled in the margins.

So what you have here in this drawing is this conflation or collapsing of time and space.

So you have 1981 collapsing into 2020.

You have Brixton, London collapsing into Atlanta, Georgia within this drawing.

I'm not gonna show you what the annotations are because this drawing is on view at the gallery, so you can see for yourself and read through the annotations.

All right.

So anytime I'm working with these public archives, I go through the process of acquiring the rights to the images.

So I'm talking with the various holders of the images and all of this stuff.

And during that conversation with one particular institution, concerns were raised.

And I think quite pointed concerns of, you know, "You're making artwork dealing with protests.

How are you going to protect the identities of those involved?"

And I explained to them, "Well, you know, the process of creating these beady curtains, there's a natural pixelation that happens.

So there's a disruption of the image, but I need to ask you now: these images are within your collection; how are you protecting the identities of those engaged in protests?"

So this led me to this particular series of drawings in which I'm purposefully leaning into this opacity.

So pixelation becomes a form.

I've used other forms such as collaging, scraping at the substrate of the paper, and juxtapositions within the drawing to make intentionally slippery interpretations of the work.

And within this work, I am very much interested in the viewer's desire to see the work, and that tension between the desire to see and the resistance to that, you know, the way in which the pixelation creates a barrier between you and the legibility of the work, in the same way that the momentarily walking through the curtain will create a disruption.

Here's another one.

Close up.

All right.

So this next piece is called "Persona Non Grata."

And this was made for El Museo del Barrio.

It was a triennial in New York.

And around that time, I was also making work for a solo show in Chicago at the Arts Club, which coincided with Chicago's celebration of Pan-Africanism.

And there was a number of shows around that theme of Pan-Africanism.

And I thought this was a great opportunity for me to engage with an interest in Walter Rodney.

And I'll talk about Walter Rodney a little bit more in a second.

So what you're looking at here is a reformulation of an image courtesy of the Jamaica Gleaner of a protest referred to as the Rodney riots in Jamaica.

So I'll paint you a quick picture.

In 1968, so just six years out of independence, prime minister of Jamaica at that time is Hugh Shearer.

He was facing considerable social and political turmoil in the country.

You had, you know, just six years out; you're still reckoning with the wake of colonial rule and all the mess that is left behind there.

You have the now-ruling class subscribing to some of the racial and cultural norms that were left over by the British.

And you have a growing disenfranchised population.

Then you have Guyanese historian and Pan-African socialist, Walter Rodney, who's teaching at the University of the West Indies at the time.

And he's seen as a threat to the administration due to his radical politics and all of this stuff.

And at some point he gets labeled persona non grata and charged with sedition.

So he's coming back from the Black Writers Conference in Canada, and he's on the tarmac, and he's refused entry into the country.

The students then protest.

And this leads to one of the largest protests in Jamaica.

And it started off as a student march and spilled out into the larger population.

And as more disenfranchised Jamaicans got involved, the protests grew.

And what you're looking at here is the police corralling the students back onto the college campus for negotiations.

So, you know, spoke with the Jamaican Gleaner, got the rights to the image, and then started creating work around it.

Here's a shot of me working in the studio on it, an image walking through it.

So what you're looking at now is the second piece called "Ballad for Rodney."

And I'm doing a couple things here.

One, I'm cropping it in such a way that the faces are not present.

We're focusing on the movement of this chase, right?

Another thing that's happening here are, if you go back, these black squares, which are about 8 1/2 by 11 inches, so a legal letter size, are reproductions of archival documents that I again researched through the Woodruff Library in Atlanta that has the Walter Rodney collection.

So it's all of these correspondence between Walter Rodney and a number of people over the year.

Of particular note, too, is Walter Rodney was also a part-time instructor here at Michigan during a period of time.

All right, so these documents are then etched into glass.

And in order to read it, you have to pull the curtain back.

This piece is currently at the Institute for Humanities, so I encourage you all to go see it and pull the curtain back, read the documents.

I'm gonna highlight this particular one.

This one was the most obscure.

So this is a letter with a money order enclosed to his widow.

So a couple years after he was sent back to Guyana, he was then assassinated.

It was a car bomb.

So this is a correspondence talking about the funds that were raised to send to his widow.

Yeah.

And here's an installation shot of the exhibition at the Arts Club in Chicago.

Another big thing is I want you to pay attention to the wooden panels that are on either side of the piece.

You know, my father was an architect in Jamaica, and I grew up constantly with someone who was obsessed with spatial awareness and someone who's constantly talking about and pointing out the ways in which architecture operates in the world around us.

And as a child, I didn't think much of it.

As an adult, I've come to realize that has greatly shaped the way I think.

And one of the things I wanted to bring to that show in Chicago was this sense of hostile architecture.

So whether it be the burglar bars, as we call it in Jamaica, these grill works that are used to protect the home or respond to the needs of the environment, or the boarded windows that are a fixture of any type of social unrest, in this case is the Black Lives Matter here in the US.

I wanted to bring that into the space and find some way of combining the vernacular of hostile architecture here in the US with that of the Caribbean.

And that arrives at these wooden panels.

Actually, let's do this.

Yeah.

So that arrives at these wooden panels.

And the negative space of the panels are actually carved into.

So you're seeing through to the outside, and every window except for the main ones in the building were covered up.

What I did not expect was that these windows would operate as a sundial.

So before I knew it, it was tracking the movement of the sun as it danced around the exhibition space, creating these really, I think, really spectacular moments.

All right, so this next piece is "4x4 Hush Now, Don't Explain."

And this is on view as well in the Stamps Gallery.

Here, as Srimoyee talked about, I'm interested in how to combine the public and the personal in terms of archival exploration.

So I went... And this is one of those moments that kinda feels full circle with me coming into Stamps.

And I do wanna say, when I came to grad school, I had some benefit of spending some time out of school first before starting grad school.

And I had a sense of some of my deficits, some of the issues that, hey, you know, this needs to be tightened up.

And one of the things that I really worked on was: how do I reconcile my interest in a public exploration of an archive that has social political implications and are very, very personal?

And how can those two things operate in the same space?

So what you have here is this metal structure that is inspired by me combing through my own personal archive that my father left back for me.

He had all of these architectural drawings, and I specifically looked at that period of time where he did these drawings and then passed away and didn't get a chance to see them actualized.

And I was looking at every intersection in these drawings and specifically looking at the domestic spaces, every intersection where I felt, oh, if we were to collaborate, I feel a curtain would go here, a curtain would go here.

And then isolate those moments and recreate a new sculptural structure.

And that's what you have here with this piece.

So that's the personal.

The public that has more social implications is what you're looking at is an image of demonstrators marking the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Mike Brown.

And, you know, I wanted to, yeah, have that moment of the personal and the public.

The sculpture in one sense feels like an extension of grieving, of mourning, of remembering, of honoring, in the same way that these individuals are performing what the scholar Christina Sharpe would term as wake work.

They're honoring those who have passed and remembering them.

All right?

So here's documentation of me working in the studio, painting these.

This is a mock-up of me working through them.

And then these are different installation shots.

And again, I wanted there to be a sense of it being porous.

So the structure has to mimic what the curtains are doing.

You can walk through them; therefore, they should be constant sight lines within the structure.

I was also thinking about the way in which architecture kinda works within the Caribbean, where things happen slowly.

You're building, you wait for a little more money to come in, then you add on, then you wait for a little bit more money to come in, and you add on.

So you're always seeing homes that are in various states of what, conventionally, or what within a Western context, you would describe as incomplete, but they're completely habitable.

And it kinda upends what we understand as a habitable space.

So I was also interested in that.

So I wanted to feel porous.

You should be able to walk through this as cavernous.

All right.

So this next piece is called "Wading in the Wake."

And "Wading in the Wake" is a piece that I wanted, when you first encountered it, for it to be ambiguous as to whether you're seeing a moment of play or a moment of violence, and for it to just sit within that level of ambiguity.

So what you're actually seeing is a moment from the '60s in which Black bathers are trying to desegregate a beach.

And there's an encounter with segregationalists and there's a tussle.

And this is a shot of me working in my Atlanta studio.

And the reason why I wanted to include this shot as well is because particularly for the students in the room, I really wanna emphasize that there's a lot of trial and error that happens when you're creating this work.

So I went through so many different iterations of like, "How the hell am I gonna paint on both sides of this curtain and get it to work?"

So I created this structure in which it hangs on both sides, end up spraying spray paint fumes all over the room, didn't work.

But it's one of those cases of you gotta try it first and see what happens and then move on from there.

And here's an installation shot to give you a sense of the exhibition space in which you had to walk through the curtains to then encounter the rest of the work.

All right.

So this next body of work is focused on migration specifically.

And again, I'm gonna start off with this quote.

"To live in a Black Diaspora, I think, is to live in a fiction, a creation of empires and also self-creation.

It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself.

It is to apprehend the sign one makes, to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art."

What you're looking at here is an image from, I think it was my second or third year, no, third year at Stamps.

And it was a set of performances in which I acquired this British red coat from London.

There's this decommissioned store where you can buy Royal Guard coats.

Interestingly enough, the name tag inside of this coat says "Whyte."

So the last person had the same last name as mine.

And then I set up a bunch of tasks to find some way of disrupting or subverting what is this heavy symbol of empire.

So what you have here is me sitting in a Jamaican classroom, recreating a moment from my childhood in high school, when... Within Jamaica, we operate in a public school system that mirrors the British system.

So there is sixth form.

Once you get to sixth form, you're kind of dressing like an English schoolboy or a schoolgirl.

So in my case, particularly on special occasions, you're wearing blazer tie.

And that first week of wearing a blazer and tie in a tropical climate is a shock to the body, right?

So I remember in high school just sweating profusely and turning to an older schoolboy and be like, "How are you calm?

You're not sweating at all."

And he said, "Your body will get used to it."

And that stuck with me.

So it's a recreation of that moment of, like, "Your body will get used to it," but your body knows first that, hey, there's a contradiction at play.

And it was one of the early moments for me as a young person where I thought, "Huh, post-independence, during the process of nation-building, we set up a certain set of rules for ourself like, 'Oh, we're going to hang onto this.

We're gonna let that go.

We're going to hang onto this.'

Why did we keep this?

What is the negotiation between ourselves to decide these are the things that we value and these are the things we don't?"

And particularly when it's at odds with how our body is responding to it.

So that's what this piece was.

So I just sat in the classroom and sweat, you know, as one of the first tasks.

The second task was I wanted to swim with a red coat.

But I mean, that's a simplified version.

What I'm really trying to do here is... You know, this is the waters of Montego Bay.

I'm familiar with this.

I would see it all the time.

I particularly picked sunset because I was trying to do a gesture similar to what Chris Ofili and David Hammons did with both the Union Jack and the African American flag.

I thought, oh, if I could subvert the British red coat and incorporate it into the Pan-African colors of red, green, and black, maybe that's a way of momentarily shifting this image or this object.

All right?

So then that brings us to this next piece.

This is part of the "Enigma of Arrival" series.

This piece is called "Carry On."

What you're seeing here is an airplane chair that has been reupholstered to look like something that you'd find in your grandmother's house.

It's complete with the plastic over it.

And I wanted it to resemble an heirloom, something that has been passed down to you from generations to generations.

So it's something you've seen as a child.

Now it may be in your possession, but it's at odds with the actual chair, which is inherently transient.

It's supposed to get you from point A to point B. You don't wanna be in it too long.

And then it's on a shipping pallet, and below it is all of this broken china.

And for me, the broken ceramics signifies the inherent disruption that migration happens.

It's a very personal, quiet disruption.

Your sense of home is shattered, and you have to pick up all the pieces and reformulate something new.

So that's what I was thinking with this piece.

And this is also at the gallery, so you can see it.

All right.

So this piece was part of my thesis show.

And for the thesis show, it was referred to as "Wake the Town and Tell the People."

It has since changed names.

We'll get to that in a second.

(laughs) So one of the things I did really love about Stamps is that it gave you several opportunities to apply for grants, get feedback from faculty, and, in some cases, get the grant money and it actually follow through on a project.

And that process of constantly applying to grants has served me well thus far.

In this particular one, my first year as part of our international travel that is built into the graduate program, I proposed traveling transatlantic triangle backwards, starting in the US, going to London, going down to Ghana, and going back to Jamaica.

And I had all of these grand plans of visiting all of these sites that had links to the transatlantic slave trade and tourism and seeing how those played out.

But it was one of those cases where you've planted a project, you get there, and that project morphs into something else.

The whole time I'm there, I'm collecting field notes, field recordings, not sure what I'm gonna do with it.

That ends up becoming a sound piece that culminated in my thesis.

What you're seeing up top here is the reference to Jamaican sound culture.

And this is an image from my thesis.

So you have this sound cart, which is called "The Well Traveled African," next to "Wake the Town and Tell the People."

Now, years out of the program, that work has morphed, and I now understand that as one of the many scores that can be inhabited in the speaker sculpture.

So one of the things that was really dear to me is that this was an opportunity to work with my uncle.

And more and more I've come to understand that the speaker sculpture is more than just the sounds that it may emit or a reference to Jamaican sound culture.

It's a relationship between my uncle and myself, both of us as makers, him as a carpenter, me as an artist, and also him as this really great storyteller.

So this is him in the graduate studios on Green Road.

He came to help me install it for my thesis.

And while we were making it together, we started off by making it in his basement in Atlanta, and then at some point realized that we made it so large that we couldn't get it through the front door.

But one of the things we did while we were making it is every break while he's cooking or whatnot, I would pull out my tape recorder and start asking him a series of questions.

And then it became... So I ended up with all of these recordings of our conversations.

So now the piece is called "Sole Imperial for Patrick Johnson."

And there is... It's playing our conversations that we had in between making it.

I'm gonna play you a clip.

What you're gonna hear is him.

The prompt was, "Talk to me about distortion.

What does distortion mean within the context of dub?"

But I'm also thinking of distortion within my own artist practice, but I'm talking to him about this.

And in the course of him talking about it, he started talking about where he grew up with my mother, how that neighborhood had a disproportionate amount of reggae artists come through there.

I mean, the one that blew my mind was he told me Sister Nancy lived down the road and all of this stuff.

But he singled out one particular sound system called Sole Imperial and talked about how that sound system was a driving economic force for the entire neighborhood.

How the parties would bring in vendors, the vendors would make enough money to buy school clothes for the children.

Whoever's house hosted the speaker sculpture could have a little bit more money to build on the house and all of this stuff.

So this is him talking about distortion and Sole Imperial.

- [Patrick] Then they would buy, like, the factory speakers and rewire them, build them over, use the same magnets, but build over the cones and rewire so it can take a higher ohmage and it can take more power and sound heavier.

It's distorted like hell, but you start to appreciate a sound there.

You know this, "Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba!"

No, them would have called that distortion, back then, that's why you used to measure how heavy the sound is.

Because when you look for it, you know, you actually see the cardboard or cardboard them using and make the cone like they are on the back part of it, and then wire it and then redo the speaker.

And let me tell you, them have to tie it on a box too.

Tie it on a box of rubber tires, car tires, or they might have to tie it onto a tree 'cause it would walk, 'cause the bass... (laughs) The bass hit so heavy, this thing is gonna walk wherever you put it.

- All right.

And then "The Well Traveled African" became this piece called "I Was Promised Land."

And so what you're seeing is this very kitschy depiction of a Caribbean beach scene.

Behind it is a neon sign that says, "We process visas and green cards here."

And then coming out of the speaker are various collaborations that I've done with different individuals.

In some cases, it's a collage of different soundbites.

One case, it's the humming from "The Jeffersons" "Moving On Up" theme song.

But yeah, so one of the reasons I'm showing this is I'm always trying to return to work, hopefully with a more nuanced approach, and trying to always refine it and make it stronger.

All right.

So this piece is called "Flags of Convenience."

This is a relatively new work.

This is one of the new kind of branching directions I'm going with the work.

In this one, I'm thinking a lot lately about the kind of uneven geographies of movement within the Caribbean Sea.

You know, it's very alarming to watch fishermen boats be bombed and warships in the Caribbean Sea amidst hurricanes and all of this stuff.

And this is not a new phenomena; you know, the Caribbean Sea has always had a kind of unequal access and movement.

Flags of convenience, the actual term, is a legal term that is utilized by cruise ships and cargo ships as a way of circumventing local jurisdictions.

So you register the ship from a nation other than the nation it actually belongs to as a way of circumventing tax, labor unions, and all of this stuff.

What you're seeing here is a combination of archival photographs and photographs that I took out on the water and layering these different bodies of waters on top of one another, also on view at the gallery.

So you can see that up in person.

This piece is called "Enigma of Arrival: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

And what you're seeing here is a suspended pallet with all of these life vests, and encrusted on all the life vests are these mussels.

So they're individually cleaned and attached to this.

And I find mussels interesting because they're bicoastal.

They need to attach to an object in order to migrate.

But there's an inherent tension in the materials where the mussels imply some form of submersion while the life vests are inherently buoyant.

So these two things are working at odds and hopefully creating a dynamic tension within the work.

This one is called "Salted Fish, Brixton Market, 2019."

I personally love markets.

I find them extremely dynamic.

Brixton Market is one that I like to visit a lot.

Again, this piece is also in the show.

Saltfish was brought to Jamaica as a way of feeding an enslaved population.

It was easy.

It was a cheaper way to feed an enslaved population.

So it's fish coming from Norway, so Norwegian salted cod.

And what I find interesting about that history is that now we're implicating Norway in this conversation of colonialism, slave trade, and all of this in a way that it typically gets excluded from the conversation.

And so what you're seeing here is this carcass of a fish that has been salt-encrusted in a way that it will not decompose.

And placed on it are these mapping pins that are mapping the spine and the base and the portion where the head was cut.

What's also interesting is that due to the salt, the mapping pins will rust over time, turning this emerald color as they oxidize.

So there's that.

All right.

So this was another piece that I made here in grad school.

This was again in my thesis show.

So what you're looking at is a shipping rope, and placed precariously on top of it is a replica of Queen Elizabeth's sugar bowl that's filled with rum.

So when I mentioned that first trip that I did where, you know, doing the transatlantic triangle, when I was in London, it just so happened that it coincide with one of the many coronation events.

So I was like, "All right, let's see what the deal is."

So I show up to Buckingham Palace, and it's crowded.

I can't really see much.

Then I go into the gift shop and I, you know, stop dead in my tracks and seeing this sugar bowl.

And what comes to mind is this quote from Stuart Hall: "I'm the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.

I'm the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth.

There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself."

So here we have, yeah, like I said, it resting precariously on top and filled to the brim with rum.

But also, what happens over the course of a show, the rum is naturally going to evaporate, so it requires constant libation.

So you're constantly going back to it and, you know, pouring one for the homies.

All right.

So typically I like to show the shipping rope with a series of drawings of portraits.

This one is called "Kiss Mi Neck Back," which is a Jamaican expletive.

And what you're seeing here is this discombobulated figure in which the hair has outgrown the hairline.

It's heavily braided, and the braids are in conversation with the shipping rope to give you a sense of scale.

It's large.

But there are other pieces that go with it.

This one is called "Trade Winds or Just a Blowout."

And to give you a sense of scale, and this one, I believe, was untitled.

All right, so we're at the last part, last section.

So in this section, I'm looking at the collective gaze and the politics of low frequency.

So to explain low frequency, I turn to Paul Gilroy and Paul Gilroy's "Black Atlantic."

And it refers to the tradition within the Black Atlantic in which enslaved Africans' expression of their desire for liberation were played out under the nose of overseers in partly hidden or public spaces.

And this first piece is called "Terra Incognita," I think.

Yeah, "Terra Incognita."

And there's a fully realized drawing in which I've placed this photograph that I took of my backyard at a time when I was living in Florida over it.

And in this body of work, I'm very much interested in the ways in which opacity is operating, in which there's a resistance to being seen while that tension of the desire to be seen is at play.

And what you're seeing up top, there's a combination of glitter, and I'm grounding up my charcoal and graphite into a paste with modeling paste to create this textured surface up top.

Here's some details.

This piece is untitled.

The white that you see there is actually me scraping into the substrate of the paper.

So it creates this pulp.

And it's across from this large mural of figures.

So wait, let's go back.

So anyone who knows me (laughs) knows that I'm a huge fan of cricket.

And cricket is a strange colonial sport, and I grew up going to cricket matches.

What fascinated me about cricket is that I understood, particularly at a young age, that there's the sport that is happening in front of you, but then there's something else happening beneath that.

And the cricket field became an arena to air out colonial grievances, particularly in the Caribbean from the '70s, like '80s through '90s.

And that's the part that fascinates me.

It was a space in which, in the stands, I would hear adults talking about what's happening in apartheid South Africa.

That's the first place I heard Nelson Mandela evoked.

So it was a space in where there's a political discourse that's happening while there's this colonial grievance is playing out on the field.

And in that way, that was mirrored.

They mirrored one another.

That's the part that I find quite interesting.

And that's why I keep returning to cricket.

It's never really a depiction of the sport itself.

So this one is called "Flash Your Horn and Show Your Second Skin."

It was part of my installation at Prospect.5.

So it's this really large mural, and you walk through beady curtains to enter into this space in which you're confronted with this jubilant Black crowd.

Now, for the Stamps Gallery, it's been recreated.

And in this case, there are gold chains with dried fish dangling from them.

This one is called "Agitation Catching Hands," which is a play on Black vernacular.

Again, this is one of those cricket scenes.

What I found interesting about this image is that it's based on a colonial archival image, but within the imagination of airing out one's colonial grievances, care was still a part of that equation.

So here you have, in this case, it's an Australian player, but we're still within the arena of cricket; you're still lumped under, like, okay, settler colonialist.

This Australian player is struck by a ball and is bleeding, and all of the West Indian players descend to offer care.

So even within this moment of like, hey, you know, there's been a wrong that has happened, there's still care that is part of that equation of this assertion of West Indianhood.

Here it is to give you a sense of scale.

Okay, so this is the curtain that I created for Prospect.

What you're looking at here is this limbo dancer.

And I'm thinking about limbo, not just in the performance of limbo, but limbo as a state of precarity.

It's based on an image of a limbo dancer who performed in Caribana; this is the first Caribana in history.

It was created as a companion or the sister to Mardi Gras.

So I was like, "Okay, there can be a conversation here that happens between New Orleans and, in this case, it's Canada."

But Caribana centers the West Indian population in this configuration.

And yeah, I was struck by this image.

By all of these cameras, all of these people looking at this Black performer.

And the entire installation was thinking about the Black performer, and all that is implicated in that.

So here's a video to give you a sense of what walking through that curtain looked like.

And one of the things I did enjoy is that once someone walks through it and the wake of their presence is still lingering in the beads, it animates what was otherwise static image.

So now it's moving in like this dance.

And in other iterations, I have tried other ways of presenting it.

This was also part of the Prospect exhibition.

Here are some close-ups.

So some of these pieces, I won't necessarily talk and explain, but you know, this is something you could bring up in the Q&A afterwards.

All right, so I'm including this one here.

I don't necessarily consider this to be a great drawing, but there's an important reason I'm including this.

First, I arrived at grad school.

We're still in the midst of orientation.

I knew, and I just moved into the studio, I knew I needed something up on the wall.

I needed to get started.

So I gave myself a prompt.

I was like, "Okay, there's a list of words.

You're making drawings in response to these words.

This is not necessarily to have this wonderful finished product.

I just need to get the blood flowing, get movement, get something up so you feel like, okay, there's a sense of accomplishment.

I can move on."

This was the first drawing I did at Stamps.

And the prompt was "vessel."

And I was just looking at the definition of "vessel," going through that and creating this drawing.

So I graduated from Stamps in 2015.

When I finally moved into my studio in Atlanta, the first drawing I did there was a response to the definition "vessel."

Here we have "vessel" again.

Every time I moved into a new space, it was a response to the term "vessel."

And then here's some close-ups.

And then finally, when I first moved into my studio in LA, respond to the definition "vessel," and this is what I have.

And that's it.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (audience chattering)