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.

I have created two masculine portraits that use the work of celebrity male wordsmiths that provide schemas of masculinity that are very different from my own. Theodore Rothke’s famous poem, “My Papa’s Waltz,” and stand-up comedy by Richard Pryor are the souce materials for my plunder.

Papa’s Valse

Character Sketch of Richard Pryor

Suspended is the original title for the concept of this piece. The actualizatio, was a collaboration with artists Stephanie Lupu and Misty Deberry, entitled, Relier.

This installation transformed an office space into a warm, inviting kitchen set slightly at an angle towards the entrance. The moment captured is that of a woman washing the dishes in silence. No matter what the audience does, they leave little to no impression on the performer, who is lost in thought.

I used to watch my mother do the dishes this way for years, exhausted from working a dead end American job, forced to clean a perpetually dirty apartment in comparison to what she had in Haiti. She would listen to Edith Piaf those nights and I could feel the loss in our lives.

At the base of the sink are projections of scrolling poetry about the relationships between the artists and their mothers. The music emitted from the tape player is a digital slowing of a Piaff chanson played through an old cassette player. On the wall are projections of snowy days blending into hibiscus flowers much like the ones back home.

Promise

The fireflies always seemed to find us
Hidden in the brush, slingshots in hand,
Clinging to the mountain side
Or under a mango tree just before dinner.
They once found me
Cursing your grandfather
In the willows behind the house.
By their light,
I never forgave him,
But still made my way back home.

I was searching for summer smiles
When I met your father.
With eyes like little magnets
He danced over my body,
Suspending me by my own breaths,
Buoyant with the promise of our love.

You were the promise of our love,
With eyes like little magnets
And a firefly in your hand
You made your way into your grandfather’s arms,
Both of you silly with summer smiles.

: :

Flashing back the glow of street lamps
Hung in the languor of November,
The silver settles.
Between the cracks in the window pane,
It licks clean the corpses of fireflies,
Failed beacons of promise
For children searching for summer smiles.

Forced from the willows, forced from our home,
Built stone by stone for you my boy,
We took that flight.
We traveled so far, strait up and so high,
Climbing,
Only to settle for a shoebox,
For Niederman, a racist,
And his super,
Alcoholic and all.

How a dirty home breaks my spirit.
I make us into engines.
We scrub and scrub
Our fingerprints thin.
Backs bent,
We hummed to the shame
of one another.