Portraits, Adhered 2021

ad·here
verb
past tense: adhered; past participle: adhered

stick fast to (a surface or substance).
believe in and follow the practices of.

As a photographer, I work to reimagine the practice of portraiture. My practice explores self, identity, and material tactility through photography, collage, paper sculpture, and audio-visual abstraction. With my ongoing self-examination series, I am treating the image of myself as a landscape for abstraction and deconstruction. I work to expand discussions around the photograph's materiality by concealing, obscuring, and protecting that which lies within the frame. I am interested in abstraction as a means of protest as it breaks through ways we are often allowed to see ourselves in contemporary art.

As Black artists, particularly Black women artists, we are usually limited to or only awarded for work based on figuration. The forms through which we can view images of ourselves are often determined by voices, opinions, and structures that do not look like us.