Inheritance, was located in a community garden between two brown stones in Harlem, New York. I pictured the garden as a sort of burial ground - picturing women buried in their finest jewelry, and musicians forever preserved with their string instruments. Synthetic hair, pearls, and bass string were braided together. The hair was used to humanize the structure but also to act as a type of fertilizer. The materials were assembled onto stacked tomato cages forming an obelisk-like structure. The work was viewed best at night, when the oasis was sent ablaze with light. Hair wrapped in hairnets and LEDs formed mounds throughout the ground with a conversational audio piece. The video work took specific examples from the neighboring streets. The projections were reflecting back onto the structures what the soil had witnessed over the decades. All of the footage was shot in and around the garden.
Fumes, is modeled after the workings of a forge, located on the ruins of the Dowlin forge. The assembly line of heating and cooling is replicated with saturated color. Small clay vessels painted with cyanotype chemicals expose a blue color that represents cooling and warming. The cyanotype process takes chemicals painted on clay and places them in sunlight. The clay is then baked by the sunbeams. The chemicals react and turn the clay a luscious blue color. Chicken wire wrapped in strips of masking tape act as the worker, in skeletal form. The video is an exaggeration of fire, projected onto the largest portion of the forge. The Dowlin forge is located on the Struble trail in Downingtown, PA. This is a site many stop to rest during their workouts.
Chester County, PA, houses buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries that are now in ruins. Buildings like mills, churches, and homes. I reinstate their history with those of the present by cleansing them with liquid light. Through these installations I address the idea of a memorial, perhaps, a memorial of today’s attractions. I am immortalizing a moment in a few hours at most, depending on the battery of my power bank. Most memorials commemorate an event or theme in time, I am just doing so in an ephemeral way. I am taking a part of the locations history and redirecting it in a futuristic fashion, while also incorporating the effects of colonization. Since the projections are so temporary, the memory will only be reconciled in these photographs.
The Mason-Dixon Line separated freedom from slavery during the Civil War. It is marked by limestones every mile and crown stones every five miles. A video titled One Drop Rule confronts the southern side of a stone. The one drop rule was a form of segregation in Jim Crow south. It traces African ancestry within mixed race individuals. The heartbeat rhythm of the drops blurs contamination within the stone. Also, Stargazers' stone is documented with a red projection to show its origin.