Can't we see the world is suffering?
In my previous body of work, the main topic centered on a negotiation of the labor inherent to the African American experience, constructed through my own lens as an African American Artist. This work was created to speak towards a labor that extends beyond the physical realm, manifesting in the tribulations of perpetually exhaustive circumstances and conditions that Blackness continues to endure.
In the interval between then and the current direction of this practice, I began to become curios about why it is that Black people are conditioned to suffer this way? What makes the suffering we have endured so unique? What do we even know about one who suffers? Hell, what do we know about suffering itself? These questions pile up and take me to a place of child-like curiosity, not only because the answers are among the vast world of experience, but that each and every person in society has to navigate them at some point in our life-long development. No one is exempt from negotiating with the presence of suffering, arguably every human encounters it. That last body of work is a testament to this same idea, it is in this newest work that i attempt to give suffering a name and start to question what it is actually doing to us. I see suffering imbedded in so much of contemporary society, to the point that many of us are seemingly desensitized to it or simply refuse to acknowledge it. What kind of world are we left with, when we refuse to address the perverted power that suffering permits?
Sitting in front of a blank canvas as i write this statement, offers a near perfect reflection of the place i find myself currently with my artistic practice. Open to infinite intuitions and impulses, along with the necessary skill to carry out whichever vision of possibility i so choose. Yet, I sit here in an unceasing contemplation, which also feels somehow relevant to my professional pursuits at this time (in training to become some sort of artist-philosopher). There resides a reluctance to expose my work to the world at large in fear of futility, combined with a skepticism toward my "Desire” of being a "conduit for conversation"— something that I’ve characterized myself as before— lurking within the recesses of my psyche. Despite my hesitations, the focus of my life remains on trying (often without promise) to channel an orientation with the world that affirms ways of working through the suffering inherent in it. A truly imperfect quest, that may only ever amount to a singular negotiation of the way suffering can exist, that only rings authentically for those who come to experience it in similar modes. Nonetheless, the intention behind the work at this time is to acknowledge the presence of suffering in the world, in hopes that collections of humans will come together at some place and time where we are capable of minimizing its power.