This interactive room-sized installation seeks to immerse its audience in a loose choreography which inherits it’s movements from an autobiographical and diasporic cultural moment captured in a still photograph. This instant was recorded a few months after my mother and I had landed in Chicago from Miami where we were vacationing.

Click here: Snow Particle System Generated in Processing

My mother was a Haitian journalist reporting the corruption under dictator, Jean Claude Duvalier. We feared for our lives. So, we ended up staying with her college friend in West Rogers’ Park. It was outside of his apartment that we were waiting for the bus when my mother pulled out a disposable camera and unknowingly initiated this piece.

I do not remember my first snow but found it fascinating that staring at this photographic medium could induce the same emotional/physical reaction that the physiology responsible for my memory released long ago.

The stop sign that was present in the photograph is going to become the main point of interaction for my installation. I purchased a stop sign that was junked for metal in Nebraska. I secured it to a wide, flat metal base, that can be fastened to the floor or a nearby wall. Strapped it with an infrared beam to it and pointed towards a camera overlooking the room.

The camera mapped the movements of the sign, when it was touched, to the generated snow particles. It also triggered the sound to play.

Sugar is a substance that has played a great part in the subjugation and enslavement of numerous peoples located and relocated in the Caribbean as a whole. In our world of refinement and packaged foods it is easy to forget how much work goes into producing sugar and what the costs are on a human level.

The film, Soy Cuba, Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (with Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, José Gallardo), was popularized by Martin Scorsese’s campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s. It paints a realistic picture of Cuba’s version of this pan-Caribbean issue.

In Sugar work, you are presented with a table divided in two by sugar canes. On one side you find a silver tray on sugar , which you are instructed to taste with a silver spoon. As you lift the spoon, a black and white projection hits the sugar. It is the scene from Soy Cuba, where the laborer burns down the sugar cane plantation after years of exploitation. As you taste the sugar you realize the the sugar is tainted with salt.

On the other side of the table, you are given a machete and instructed to pull sugar from the raw cane, a task that may prove to be very difficult on cumbersome for the audience members.

Kafu is an installation consisting of sculpture, mural, and performance. The sculpture is a handmade traditional Haitian beverage card for a drink called fresco. The performance is that of a fresco merchant that mans the cart in the heat of July. He uses the crossroads as a means of making a living, much like the artist might use a gallery.

The mural is a replica of many Claude Dambreville paintings depicting Haitian Market scenes. His style highlights black labor and unity through the use of silhouette, which down plays the agency of the individual voice. I hypothesize that his type of depiction in the Haitian Diaspora can read as disempowering for those that seek connection with Haitian culture but have developed a fierce American sense of individuality. My solution was to paint the mural in chalkboard paint, assign each figure a thought or speech bubble, and provide the audience with sticks of chalk to allow for expression.

Kafu is the Haitian Creole word for crossroads. The crossroads in Haitian culture has many meanings. The first is more literal, meaning the place where the individual comes in contact with their society. That might mean, socially, where the individual blends into the people at marketplace, creating the unity of the whole (the group is more important than the individual). This is an aesthetic that is pan-African and moves along post colonial slave/trade routes. It might mean economically, where the individual’s only opportunity to eat that day is defined by how hard the dig into the streets. This is particularly true for the masculine provider roles that are common in Haitian society. Religiously the crossroads is both a representation of the Christian Crusafix and the place where the sprits move to and from the spirit worlds in Vodoun.

I wanted to create a device that, by design, would make someone aware of their own sense of commitment. I was trying to explore the complexities of my commitments to my partner at the time. She would soon have my daughter and later be my wife.

This sculpture is suspended by the ceiling of a gallery by steal cables. The participant approaches the main element, which is a microphone. On the microphone the words “make a wish” is written. When they speak into the microphone, two heat lamps cast their energy on a block of ice suspended beneath the microphone.

As the block melts, it releases encapsulated pennies throughout the coarse of the night. Together with the water drops, the pennies fall into a metal dish which resonates upon impact. The dish is equipped with a contact mic and the sound is looped to create an indeterminate soundscape.

Participants end up choosing a penny near the edge of the block of ice and begin making wishes, putting forth the time and work necessary to make something powerful happen.