Moving to Haiti at the crux of forming the construction of what it was to become a man was something that has changed my perception of masculinity in general.

With this installation I was looking at the tie between the construction of the streets and the perpetuation of masculinity. I assign the street the role of the stage, a place where characters can exhibit themselves. This is a play on the crossroads of Afro-Caribbean and African spiritual belief. The characters are taken from popular Haitian society. These were the characters that I have used to construct my perception of masculinity.

The fresco man (the mechant with the cart) embodies endless work as a model for masculinity. As a father and husband I feel the cultural weight of being a good provider.

The drunk is the escapist in me that I try not to feed with too much dancing, drugs, or alcohol. That is a model of manhood that pulls humanity apart.

The molotov cocktail man is my version of the machete man of the Haitian revolution. He physically creates change and assert a physical justice. I want his conviction and courage.

The most horrific thing that I absorbed in Haiti was dehumanizing people for a political purposes. The man in the truck tires is a burning statue. A sacrificial man who’s enemies found to be less valuable than an idea.

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.