Mortal and pestle between my teeth
--------I meant mortar
Making a paste between the morals
--------I meant molars
Either way, I make
a paste of you.

 

Tender Picking, was presented at Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn, NY in 2017. TP is an performative installation that celebrates metabolism as an act of wanton love. A radio-style drama, performed  by  Theresa Columbus  and  Tracie Jiggetts, chaperon participants through the fits and starts of an unexpected romance via a dual channel headset. All the while participants pick and consume the carcass of a freshly steamed Blue Crab, and it is the simultaneity of this action that invites the viewer into the all-consuming affection between the diner and the dined. 

Impulsivity and brevity play an important role in this work, thanks in part to necessity. For a dazzling 40 min each day I cut off the lights in my Baltimore City Public Schools classroom, put my rump in a chair, and make a painting. Occasionally one of the eager (or bored) adolescents who avoids the cacophony of the cafeteria by posting up in my classroom, will creep over to my desk and look over my shoulder. At these moments, I am grateful for how easily the work slides into messy pools of ink, obscuring my infatuation with body and the sometimes bawdy nature of these femme beasts. No doubt, adolescence lingers in and around these paintings, making them byproducts of the often loud and hormonal chaos of the Middle School years. Mining my own awkward, sometimes painful, often depressed and frequently frivolous teens, I draw without a plan and yet a preconceived notion arrives. The characters that repeatedly show up in these works are The Girl and Her Horse, and sometimes, The Horse and Her Girl. The many childish hours I spent dreaming of riding off into the unknown are made manifest here in a twisted, noodling infatuation. As an adult, I can see the tension between dreams of cantering free and the centuries long domestication of a wild a beast. To wit, the iconography of the horse represents my anxiety around complacency in a time of intense societal rupture. These paintings are, for me, a complicated yet earnest entanglement.