In my artistic practice, I have been studying, observing and deconstructing the tenets, ideals and concerns of western liberal society, targeting the seams of the socio-cultural fabric, specifically the malleable, mutating, transfiguring space of sexuality and sexual moeurs in culture. The ideasand practices which both reflect and reveal the values of the western establishment.

In this study I have been focused on the relationship between social objects such as, race, gender, social standing and cultural erudition in relationship to representation and affectation in sex, pornography, romantic narrative, popular media, and advertising; while factoring in the historical precedence for these factors with regards to race, gender, sexual identity and representation.

In this space I have relied heavily on the studies of George Bataille and George Foucault, as both a genesis and a theoretical framework to catalogue and analyze the variety of symbols, practices, and adumbrations, I have been collecting so as to determine whether they are symptoms,reflections, causes or effects of the society in general.

In Bataille, I found both the artifice of the discourse as
well as the entry into the subject, a subject which due to
its quasi constant taboo status in society was harder to penetrate than more lofty goals without being dismissed as trite self satisfactory masturbation.

In this tract, I have found myself interested in the nebulous cultural space in which we find European “Orientalism” and the connected and seemingly endless obsession with the “Noble Savage” a constant mythical element in both the european and american origin stories.

Images, symbols and fevered dreams, as exemplified by painters such as Eugene Delacroix and his romantic contemporaries, or the writings of Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) or the descriptions of “Jim” in Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, or in paintings of Gauguin who obsessed with the “naive”, but also in today’s pop culture with hackneyed symbols such as the Pocahontas, the dragon lady, the Mandingo, the last native warrior, the geisha, etc; imagery and visions that have been consistently maintained, updated, and used by western culture both as a framework to excuse atrocities carried out by the civilized liberal towards various savage others, as well as to underline the contemporary conversation of the “modern progressive” with regards the conditions which sustain the socio economic ills that have been symptomatic to the life in the post colonial order.

These observations, this study for me, has now turned to the visualization and representation of this equation: The sexually objectified presentations of the “native” vanquished by the possessive and obsessive gaze of the “civilized” vainqueur.

The obsession with the “Object”.
The object of lust, The object of fear, the object of disgust, the object of fascination, the object of comparison, the object of confusion, the object of rejection and ultimately the object that symbolizes all desires, whether positive or negative.

Another aspect of my practice has been a slower more systemic investigation of humanities capacity as a destructive on our planet. Our calamitous abilities which are not only affecting our daily lives but guarantee the eradication of humanity within a few generations.
From early childhood, I have been observing and documenting this situation, while traveling around the world in areas affected by this human made disaster. Early on I was confounded by how we willfully ignore the lessons of the past and wear blinders to avoid confronting our present ills, to our own detriment.

In my practice, this work has generally been represented by a constant “circular” narrative on the forgetfulness and forgetting that can be described as “decay”.
The physical decay, mental decay, the blurring and melting of time, place, emotion, that occurs as the detritus of history piles onto itself and is slowly engorged into an amorphous but malleable muck.

My current creative process is comprised of playing with the aesthetic values ascribed to the specific mediums I am using for a particular project, while working within the theoretical framework of the question I am investigating.

In effect the vector created by the intersection of mediums, aesthetics, and conceptual rigidities.

Medium: (1) Video, sound and time based media, (2) Photography, (3) Interactive, tech based and Net art (4) painting, printmaking and traditional mediums. Conceptual: (1) Ideals and concepts of Time, (2) human sexuality, (3) the insider/outsider

Theoretically I have been concerned with issues of representation and perception, although I have left behind making work concerned with “the individual self”, and have been studying the ways in which people represent

themselves, the marginalized members of their societies, and “the other”, aka those outside of their lived experience.

Time

In my practice, I have been very interested with the representations of the concept of ‘Flat time’ or the idea of an existence framed by “parallel timelines” experienced concurrently, an existence where all ancestral beings and all spirit entities co-exist concurrently in both their respective timelines as well as in ours.

This temporal concept can be found in a number of
African and Asian mythologies and religions, and is deeply ingrained into the story of diasporic african communities in the americas, throughout all of their cultural production.

I have used a variety of means to convey this aesthetically and conceptually, whether through visual layering and time shifting, with interactive storytelling and participatory media, multi framed and multi angled representations, or through serial artifact ideation –creating multiples of almost similar images or objects.

Insider/ Outsider to the African American Experience As a non American, I have been studying the historical, contemporary and contextual reality of the African American experience.

This I have done through:

• Qualitative observation –while living in multipleurban centers, working as artist in residence in african american community centers in Louisville KY (Smoketown), and in Chicago, (Street Level Youth Media).
• Traveling around the US and studying the history and socio economic conditions of the towns and places I visited, and currently living in a disadvantaged inner city neighborhood in north philadelphia with a majority of black residents
• Cultural cataloguing, of arts, media, stories, myths, food culture etc
• Multiple classes in different related cultural issues; for example “Race, Religion, Culture and Representation”; “African Diaspora in the US and Latin America” @ SAIC
• Studying representations in both US and international media and cultural artifacts, such as investigating the myths of real and created black anti heroes such as “Stagger Lee”, “Django”, “Rhygin”, “Robert Charles”, “Sweetback” ; their possible African antecedents and the connection to myths such as Brer Rabbit, Bouki the Hyena and other tricksters.
• Reading, listening to and learning from African Americans about the physical and psychic realities they inhabit, whether in classic works from writers such
  as Baldwin, Ellison, wright, Walker, Morrison, Hughes, Hurston, Angelou, Baraka, Cullen, McKay, Haley, Wilson, Cade, or contemporaries such as Whitehead, Beatty, hooks but also film makers, and musicians, and other cultural makers and starting with classics (Micheaux, Parks, Van Peebles, Riggs, and keeping up with contemporaries.
• Analyzing the assumptions that are oft projected on their black bodies –and by default onto my black body.

Sexuality/ Embodiment

Human sexuality and all of its connective tissue has been the area were I have spent the most time, in my practice. At a young age, due to my schooling in French schools, and my parent’s collection of artists monographs I became captivated by the works of european romantic orientalists, men such as Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Of course I was attracted to the general eroticism of these works, but I was also fascinated and perplexed, by the frequent interplay of race, gender, power, violence, and the contrasting representation of beastly primal black and brown men in opposition to the treasured sexualized somewhat mystical white women.

These early experiences where foundational in my cultural education as they were so sharply contrasted with my lived experience in Haiti, and Africa where the majority of the people around me were black but the power structures were clearly defined by colonial european dominance.Later on contacts with Sade, Henry Miller, and other trashy victorian materials in both french and english, which constantly asked me to challenge the societally proscribed ideas of the natural/acceptable and civilized hetero- normative sexual moeurs, but all of this material had the same common threads where power and violence were highlighted with ideals of race, gender and the exoticisation of the other all of it centered around idolatry of the virginal white woman.

The importance of these early experiences, have consistently made their way into my practice, from my earliest serious works.

My early attempts at self representation in this context was a photo collage piece of my nude body into a swastika like layout. Later on I attempted to flip the script and represent myself again in both the erotic poses usually assigned

to white women as well as the showing the terror masks usually imposed on black men’s faces.
Neither of those projects were particularly successful, as they were quickly interpreted instead as identity pieces revealing my queer identity, something that I was not specifically attempting to do.

With the aid of oft-quoted investigators of sexual moeurs such as Bataille, Nin, and Foucault, my practice has constantly targeted this aspect of the human experience; initially working with my own sexual identity and representation, but quickly becoming interested in the more arcane interplay between sexuality and society itself. From this position, and with the rise of internet culture, I have worked on a variety of different short net art and media pieces around these issues. Tapping into the vast trove of material constantly created by the web, while still looking back on historical imagery and media on the ideas espoused by the orientalist.

The current phase of this work is a project called larger project titled “Evidence”.
Evidence is in effect another attempt for me to target ideas I found exciting but difficult to work with in the writings of George Bataille, as well as the reflections on Bataille’s oeuvre in Foucault’s “L’Histoire de la sexualité” –The history of sexuality.

In “Evidence: Blood” I have been producing a series of Photograph over a period of 4 years, that fluctuate between the terror of malignancy in images of death and the cosmetic beauty of corporal death.

The obfuscation of sexuality in all communication, media, daily life in general, and the persistent societal malignancy of those who persist in questioning this taboo’s status; which has consistently prevented deeper analysis of sex’s role in civilization’s ills, joys, triumphs and failures.