TLP: Can you tell us about your latest work and what you hope to accomplish during your residency with us?

BRICK (The last shall be first) is a dual homage to my friendship with Hector Muños Guzman, an artist and brother who I met at RISD, and to Franz Fanon's guiding works. Guzman's rendition of Diego Rivera's Indian Warrior is graffitied on the bricks, with drips of white fluid descending from the police officer and elsewhere on the scene. Fanon's quote prophesied the nature of the image: "In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists." Daggered Wisahkakw leaves tell us of the shifting season. I wanted a story that would be indebted to an animistic relationship to the city and its legacy of struggles. My duration with TLP will be dedicated to cultivating more animistic stories in the city. I've known no better home than the Lands of Harlem and Soundview. I hope that the images I create will honor the sentience of the numerous lifeforms of the city, the Land's animistic legacy, and the legacy of its current inhabitants. 

TLP: Without revealing too much, can you share a bit about your forthcoming solo show and the new work you'll be exhibiting with us?

I’ve been trying to understand what it means to synthesize a poetic relationship to the complex totality that is NYC. How does one return to an animistic relationship to a city fraught with the psychological and material alienation of capitalism. Where colonialism’s bloodlust encircles itself. Having removed the Lenape it proceeds to cannibalize the land's living descendants. How does one reciprocate and respectfully dialogue with the Lenape legacy on the land, and understand one’s own migratory and colonial existence? The question has taken me to alter the traditional materials I’ve become accustomed to with oil painting, and shift into a reciprocal relationship with other sentient life forms. I felt that narrative and storytelling weren’t enough to guide myself into a profound love and connection with Land as a sentient being(s), so I needed a shift in materials. 

TLP: What inspires you in this moment?

Animism, the intimate relationship between indigenous cultural labor, and indigenous subjectivities that form poetic bonds with Land. I’ve been archiving pre-Columbian and contemporary indigenous art since the start of the new year. Moche and Nazca ceramics have been especially dear to me during this time. These objects tell intimate stories of these people's relationship with flora and fauna. While the exact stories did not survive the millennia of time in between their creation and now, it is impossible to not see how they perceived the sentience of non-human life. These ancient objects are ancestral guides to cultural labor. They have helped me understand what it means to build a relationship with the whole of life; from Pebble, to Cattail, to Turtle, to Clouds, and to the Moon.