I am a black artist from Chicago, though I am a painter, I use methods from sculpture treating images more an object of inquiry. Mainly inspired by mental illness and the various aspects of its manifestations I have established a framework by which mental illness can be used as a strategy to question ideas of normativity and complacency of with our image-based world. Many aspects of mental illness take the form of dissociation, disengagement, disorientation and the inability to focus on certain ideas or concepts.
Through methods of media manipulation such as obscuring, duplicating, size, resolution and display composition I weave a narrative of how images pervade our lives. In doing so I seek to use my mental illness as a way to critique how we in many regards take images to establish our reality. I also seek to legitimize the perspectives of those including myself who have had mental illness and felt themselves excluded from the current discussion regarding identity and expression in the real world at large.
