The Spirit Will Not Descend Without Song

Singing ‘I’m tired’ falls short of any account of the causes and effects of racial traumas. And still, the phrase highlights the significance of ‘song’ to both the in/visibility associated with blackness and our understanding of its images. Sing-up, or be sung-for. I focus on redressing how systems of power deploy images and technology to sing-for: to score myths, naturalise racist rhythms, and further compose nationalist bonds while severing sacred and secular solidarities within blackness itself. Photographically woven cotton tapestries represent entangled intersections through which to conceptualise deep and persistent traces of repressed historical realities.

I manipulate images to appear to hold a televisual glitch (ghosting and vertical roll). For me, this marks a disruption in communication—a vertical roll occurs when the receiving and transmitting frequencies are ‘out of sync.’ My woven images assume the televisual dance of the vertical roll and the trauma superimposition of a ghost. (hor)Rorschach (D0wnw0rd D0g) (2019-2023) weaves a photograph of the arrest of a group of Black men during the Watts Riot/Revolution (1965). Composed as a diptych, physically distressed, and treated with a mix of dye and paint, the central floral pattern reflects the psychological test carried in the title, Rorschach. With this in mind, and cotton as its field, the psychological consequences are woven into the image. While in works like imag/e/mag mag (2023), NBA legend Vince Carter is seen with multiple arms, both fulfilling colonialism’s expectation of black labour, and rehearsing and recalling the enslaved labour associated with the tapestry’s material—cotton.