Artist Statement
In my work I use ”the body” as a concept and my own body as a site to challenge and transform social myths and rituals. Through video, performance and drawing, i frequently use heroism, double consciousness, familial themes, queer theory, and science fiction as conceptual platforms in my work.
    One of the main misc en scene’s and resources in my studio practice is my mother’s drawings and recordings. My mother has created thousands of schematic diagrams of common objects commonly found in the domestic sphere. Taken together, these everyday objects express matrilineal concerns, domestic propriety and an obsession with capitalism and entrepreneurship. My mother also created a body of musical recordings that were modeled after Christian and heteronormative structures of love, desire, spirituality and vanity. These songs form the soundtracks to all of my videos.
    The video “Adam for Adam” combines contemporary dance club culture, science fiction, Biblical tropes and Nigerian Gelede masquerade culture. The video brings together romantic and violent sensibilities, documenting a scene that blurs the line between a nuptial ceremony and persecution of two anomalies whose identities have been erased. The metonymy of queer aesthetics and the black body are the catalysts that keep the story oscillating between wedding ceremony and hate crime.
    I use dance and performance as a means of demonstrating the ritualistic and devotional relationship consumers have to artifice, glamour, material culture and wealth. In collaboration with my mother, I design the costumes, loosely basing them on her schematic diagrams. In the video “Model It,” I perform in these self-made couture clothes on Fifth Avenue. In this context, my dance ritual reflects our familial affinity for television programs like Dynasty and The Colby’s, (which inspired my name,) and served as models for ways of attaining wealth and power in white America.
    In the video “Country Ball 1989—2010,” I address loss and the liminal threshold between the past, present and future. I restored and repurposed a video of my southern family barbeque and party recorded in the mid-1980s. “Country Ball 2010” is a triptych that is comprised of the original footage, my mother’s schematic diagrams of the memory, and a 3D-generated futuristic interpretation of the ritual and the drawings.
Overall, I am autonomously creating a multimedia empire with the body, my mothers drawings and songs as a blueprint. These resources triangulate similarly to any design house (I.e. the Bauhaus). I am the performer and apprentice for an incognito conceptual house. This allows me the freedom to push creativity and imagination to its limit and thread across a broad range of conceptual terrains.