Art & Visual Culture (AVC O5-O8)

My body of work speaks about culture, economic status, and racial issues. I have incorporated stereotypical imagery of African Americans in the United States history and some of the unhealthy, and the popular lifestyles encouraged through the media that affect the Black community. I have created parodies of some advertisements in my series using marker and graphite on paper. I focus on issues by utilizing the history of and current trends in advertising using the scale and changing the text to make each piece satirical. I am focusing on a few specific topics that affect the Black community such as food deserts, obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and different cancers.

As a Christian, I am part of the more than 84 percent of the world that identifies with a faith-based or religious group. Faith is powerful. It carries us through our crushing moments and supports us in our greatest triumphs. While faith can manifest through a myriad of customs, prayer stands out as a key source of strength from various religious perspectives. Prayer is a cornerstone of Christianity, and the practice of talking with God can be both ceremonious and intimate. My thesis is titled, Windows, because it provides the opportunity for viewers to both witness and partake in this spiritual exchange. The exhibition consists of artworks that are visual interpretations of prayers. These prayers have been written not only by myself, but by men and women around the globe. The process of writing a prayer sends participants on a therapeutic journey, activating an honest evaluation of who and what they hold dear, and the ephemeral nature of life on earth. The exchange is unquestionably vulnerable. Consequently, each work holds a unique piece of the individual it represents. Through an amalgamation of conversation, correspondence, and research, Windows, uses the visual arts to characterize the ways Christians express and reside in their faith.

“Madonna”, is a cinematographic photo series that follows the story of two young adults, Madonna and Kiddo, and explores three major institutions in our society that were supposedly put in place to help us function as a union - education, capitalism, and religion - but sometimes miss the mark. Throughout their adventures, the introspective and intellectual Madonna, played by Adonnica McKenzie, assists Kiddo, played by Antoine Manning, in opening his eyes to reality and learning more about himself and the way the world as we know it to work. I am capturing these images on 35mm film, stylized as cinematic stills accompanied by yellow, sans serif subtitles. I decided to approach these topics because as a young adult, I, like many others, have experienced the education system, capitalism, and religion in some capacity, and also remember the point of awareness when each of them became less “normalized” for me. I remember the point in which school did not feel as effective to me as it should have, the consciousness of corruption of our financial system, and understanding of the manipulation of religion, specifically towards oppressed groups looking for any sense of faith to help them through hardship. In this series, I am opening a dialogue about how these systems can improve to help people instead of oppress them.

“A space can bear the imprint of its inhabitants even in their absence. An object can personify an individual even more than his or her portrait.” -María Magdalena Campos-Pons

 
   María Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Spoken Softly with Mama elucidates the entanglement of identity performance and space through a material memory bringing forth a consideration of the domestic sphere as a critical lieux de mémoire of Black women’s geographies. Home as a material space and geographical location becomes a conceptual anchor for Campos-Pons' interrogation of what she terms the "location of the self." She privileges vernacular and quotidian materials to take up concerns of Black womanhood, memory and the slippages of identity. Building upon the works of Katherine McKittrick, Jasmine Cobb, Pierre Nora and Nicole Fleetwood as well as theories of performativity, spatiality, materiality and memory, I aim to examine the domestic sphere not only as a location of sense-making and selfhood, but also a critical lieux de mémoire for Black women.