My artistic practice addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mediate, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, I have produced a body of work about dismantling borders, transcending penal matter, and turning places of precarity into places of possibility. My community-engaged art practice consists of multi-year site interventions using performance, public actions, and sound, where I locate my work through the lens of abolition geography. I strive to embody materiality through touch and transformation, creating opportunities for viewers or participants to engage in a tactile, haptic experience.

I often work within historically marginalized spaces, addressing the profound consequences of systemic erasure. My community-engaged practice is centered around long-term, site-specific interventions—usually involving performance, public actions, and sound. For this reason, my artistic endeavors are rooted in liberatory action driven by a commitment to community. Influenced by hyper-local contexts, I challenge conventional understandings of geography, the social constructs of space, and the carceral continuum. By mediating, subverting, and reimagining the familiar or overlooked, I seek to provoke new interpretations and perspectives.

In my large-scale public interventions, I work with various community members and the public to generate a form of collective meaning-making. This process requires spending significant time in a community to research local scholarship and the values they share or find contentious. Due to the complexity of mediating within an elaborate environment contextualized by varying histories, power structures, and visions—I consider the labor of relationship-building as profoundly critical to the work’s success. My work with others is self-aware of the precariousness involved in producing art together; the element of risk is always higher when it includes the lived experiences of people. For example, “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” (a public, site-responsive visual and audio broadcast produced with men incarcerated in the largest single-site jail in the country) studied the physical characteristics of detention in relationship to the body, generating fictional narratives about freedom and confinement. We broadcast the work on a significant portion of the jail wall exterior, where the dividing line between those incarcerated and the public took on a more profound representation that impacted how the public viewed those incarcerated and how they saw themselves within a system of power. This tenuous balance is steeped in critical pedagogy and leaves room for play and experimentation as vital forms of artistic process.

Most recently, I scavenged discarded carceral debris from my neighborhood jail and created casts of the rubble in glass. Through this act of transfiguration, the cell bars and bricks that produce confinement and obstruction are made see-through and permeable – windows that were once walls. Currently, I am collaborating with musicians to work with the natural sound frequencies of the steel bars themselves. When played, the bars produce sonic vibrations that function as a form of release, a stark contrast to their original mandate. “We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis)” has been performed by six award-winning musicians, including Dr. James Gordon Williams, Samora Pinderhughes, Elena Pinderhughes, The Innocents, Thomas Stanley, and Jamal Moore, and within several states California, Virginia, and New York with more venues to come.

My practice seeks to meaningfully impact contested spaces and engage brave communities by transgressing dehumanizing boundaries. My projects have resulted in long-term collaborations with many communities that continue long after the completion of a project. I understand this to be a true testimony to the depth of our kinship. These relationships form the foundation of my work and lend structure and tone. The depth and fluidity of this human component permeate gallery and museum spaces, and it continues to grow and evolve in my practice over time.