statement
My studio practice shares with my scholarship an interest in the social sites where race, class, gender, sexuality, and power collide. Whereas my scholarship studies these topics through ethnographic and archival methods resulting in the written word, my visual practice uses photography, film/video, performance, and installation to invite viewers into different ways of seeing and knowing. Loss, grief, bodies, ephemerality, and queer storytelling animate the ways I want others to see people, places, and politics through a slight shift of the lens (in all senses of the word). I make work that is intuitive, experimental, and research-based.
My vantage point as a humanistic social scientist makes visible the possibilities and limitations of art as a tool for political education and collective liberation. Although lens-based media is the main focus of my practice, my refusal to be disciplined leads me to blur the lines between image, text, and action. Personal and community archives figure prominently in my practice as sites of knowledge and visual production that I remix to tell different kinds of stories. I am deeply influenced by AIDS agitprop, 90s new queer cinema, porn vs. art debates, queer portrait photographers, durational performance art, erotic archival materials, and documentary photography by anyone who’s not white and/or a man.