Artist's Statement

I investigate the different ways that Black women are often represented and seen, and how Black women sometimes see themselves. I’m interested in unconventional displays of beauty that challenge and counter the distorted imagery of Black women based on a Eurocentric gaze. The very process of Black girls becoming women involve assaults upon femininity, labor entitlement, and definitions of beauty.

The work in this exhibition investigates "the talk" — a conversation that Black mothers often have with their daughters to ensure that they will be equipped to function in a world that is not always kind to Black women and girls. The project also allows daughters to examine and consider how prepared their own mothers were to face these challenges and to allow Black women to be "seen " within her complex history.

Photographs that manipulate darkness and light in coordination with specific features capture dynamic parts of the whole beauty that is the Black female. Pairing photographs and videos in the same space allows the subjects full autonomy over how they are represented. Exploring issues such as representation, colorism, and parenting, my work seeks to counteract what is projected onto Black women, asking the viewer to recognize the eternal life that Black women's bodies and souls carry: their beauty, vulnerability and female humaneness.