My practice explores how individuals within the African Diaspora and Latin America seek joy and purpose, while reflecting on themes of community, ancestry, and colonial history. Most profoundly, I investigate the relationship between the inner child and adult self, creating from an intersectional, femme, and Afro-Diasporic perspective. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and performance, I pursue joy through the use of bright, vibrant hues that challenge perceptions of reality and trauma, expanding how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world around us. I also employ colors to subvert the socio-political condition of invisibility placed upon Black people.
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Color is memory, and transports me to my early childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s, where I was surrounded by vibrantly painted homes. These hues not only contain a family's history, but express the joyous way of living on the island. The oversaturated palette and expressive mark making in my work is both personal and political; It evokes raw expression, spiritual channeling, intuitive action, and emotional honesty. When I access my rawest state of joy, anger, sadness, or confusion, that energy demands to be seen in its entirety in order for it to be transformed. Color, in that state, is undeniably itself. Taking up creative and emotional space in this way is freeing as a soul located within a Black female body.
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I visualize real, spiritual, and imaginative spaces. My abstract paintings ask of me to move and embody a diasporic history in order to create their marks and leave behind trails of (coded) information. In my representational painting work, by incorporating remnants of the figure (heads, hands, feet) within abstracted environments, I convey a space in which the body and the spirit can communicate, find alignment, and reconnect. These extremities act as antennas for purpose and spirit and are often depicted and adorned with long lashes, lipstick, and acrylic nails, physical features that embody creative expressions of beauty, self love, and care present in femme communities within the African Diaspora and Latin America. At times, left hands are adorned with green and brown beaded bracelets called Ide, worn by Ifa practitioners, and that I wear everyday. Ifa is an ancient divination system from Yorubaland in West Africa that provides folks with spiritual information regarding their destiny and ancestry through a connection with spirit. It is a practice and way of life that has been present in the African Diaspora by way of Transatlantic Slavery.
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The colorful, visually layered, expressively marked and energetic loudness of my work is in direct contention with the psychological invisibility that is placed upon Black bodies, Black souls, Black creativity, and Black histories in Eurocentric societies. It is important to me to create works that are understood by and reflect the experiences of the African Diaspora and Latin American communities, and that demand to be seen, felt, and experienced, because that energy knows itself and knows that you know it, too.
