Early on in your creative pursuits, you were an actor. Does that background in performance show up in your work now?

It’s crazy because I have a friend who’s known me since I was 16 or 17, when I was an actor. They say, “You’re still an actor,” [Laughs]. They’re like, “You may not be opting to perform right now, but you’re still an actor.” And, I feel like that’s very much true. I’ve literally placed myself in almost all of my films.

I’m placing myself in the works because they’re autoethnographic. You can get to a truth through me. I’m using my body, my life, my experiences to talk about larger ideas. For example, if I’m in The Giverny Document and I’m playing the role of the Négresse Impériale in [Monet’s] garden, well, what am I a signifier for? Or thinking through the colonial gaze, then we can think through the Black body in Western art; or Black women’s roles in the slave community and our bodies as these spaces of capitalist commodification, et cetera.

So I am the stand-in. You can place your body here now because of my body. My body is simply in many ways just a signifier. I found myself in that garden and felt put upon and acted upon in that space in such a way where I was feeling like maybe my safety was in question. So let’s have this conversation via my body.

So though it’s not acting, it’s in some ways doing a lot of the labor that actors do. They ask these larger questions around a character’s wants and desires, questions around story, the challenges that the character faces, those same things are being brought to bear in my work.

Also, performance is a way or exerting a kind of power. [Academic and writer] Saidiya Hartman talks about performance as a kind of recalibration: you’re resetting the terms of the space through your body and actions. So when I stepped into that garden I definitely say it as a set.

You debuted a new neon sculpture from your series, “Citational Ethics,” at Art Basel in Miami last year. Can you tell us about it?

There are three Citational Ethics works. That was the third one, it’s a little bit different. It features Zora Neale Hurston, the others are based on text by Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman. It’s also in neon, but the other ones usually have the actual citation, the text, in very bold neon. But this text is kind of hidden. It’s etched into obsidian stone. And the neon is shaped to form a kind of vanity set.

The citation is from Zora Neale Hurston’s book of folklore called The Sanctified Church. In this text, there is an essay on the mythological figure High John the Conqueror, who was said to be able to evade capture. He was a kind of trickster figure. He would bring laughter and joy and music to the enslaved. He would bring a kind of levity. He was a jokester. He could out-think the Master. So the actual citation is “Then the whisper put on flesh.” What she’s saying is High John the Conqueror began as a will to sing, a desire for a kind of levity. He sprang forth in the minds of the people. So they thought him up first, and then he became a real man.

This is an act of conjuring, of manifestation, of power. We need something that is going to get us through, somebody who’s going to bring laughter and song. We need somebody who’s going to make the Master look like a fool every once in a while.

So the idea is this mirrored vanity as a portal, as a site of divination and conjure. Obsidian stone is often called a scrying stone. To scry means to gaze, to envision. And so it is said that if you look at obsidian long enough and if you have the power, then you will begin to see visions. So the work is a physical sight of enactment, a site of engagement, a site of conjuring and making, self-making, collective self-making, et cetera.

Features

The Social Documentary Film alumnus examines the Black perspective through various multi-media formats.