WORK CYCLES
Cycle One
2014-PresentGuerrilla Exegesis is a knowledge exchange, personal library, and research index, comprised of around 2000 books, catalogues, magazines, and pieces of printed matter.
The project uses are.na boards and research timelines to circulate and annotate printed and digital materials organized around recurring themes and questions.
The collection spans many genres, but has a particular focus on Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Art History, Black Theology, Religious Folk Art, and Religious History, informed by a Black, queer, and trans perspective that approaches religion as a cultural and art historical formation.
In addition to the library, I regularly visit religious and spiritually significant sites and artworks and record ephemera from around the world.
Cycle Two
2016-Present
Ecce Homo is a series of seven “Knowledge Projects”, comprising installations of photography, writing, and body modification, plus an accompanying essay.
For five out of seven projects, viewers are taken across America, Ireland, and Turkey via text, installation and image, in the mythological tradition of “great men”—exploring the relational possibilities of topographical tropes and photographic history. Focused on the concept of becoming an observer, Ecce Homo utilizes the Photographer and the Author as “neutral figures”—ethnographically objective purveyors of knowledge about people and places.
The sixth and seventh projects of the series turn inward, focusing on bodily neutrality or body as landscape or “becoming a great man”; a 5-year long physical, legal, and chemical creation of a “new self” and an exploration of the moral boundaries of disclosure.
Cycle Three
2023-Present
The Way of Sorrows will consist of 14 site-specific roadside memorial installations.
The Way of Sorrows, will consist of 14 site-specific roadside memorials/installations across a variety of global terrains traversing the Middle East, Europe, and North America, drawing reference from the biblical “Stations of the Cross”, or “The Way of Sorrows.”
Roadside memorials pepper the many highways that criss-cross the United States. They are ubiquitous as well as elaborate in the southwest, where they stand out extremely against the empty landscape. Particularly outside the main highways, the roadside memorial takes on the form of an installation - an interactive space for both mourners and observers, often with little connection to the memorialized person. The memorial becomes a roadside attraction or spectacle, challenging and reshaping the landscape, taking utilitarian terrains and turning them into spaces for contemplation, visibility and aesthetic messaging.
The first project in Way of Sorrows, Sarah Sarai Hagar Hajar, is a site-specific installation made for Harran, Turkey, 20 km north of the Syrian border and mythical home of the patriarch Abraham. The piece explores the appropriation of the story of Abraham through Hagar via black American theology and cultural mythology and the intersection of the Hajar story in Islam.