UC Davis

Based on my artistic practice from my research involving expanded field theory; for example, my performance piece “Drawing While Black aka Non-Binary Joy” formerly known as “Drawing While Black aka Black Boy Joy,” is an exploration of sensorial feel/felt lines both in text and performative drawings involving 2D, 3D, 4D, and text-based art practices. Moreover, the work explores how Black, Indigenous, Queer, and People of Color (BIQPOC)'s have created a means of survival through visual/performance art, creating a mode(s) of active radical resistance. These mode(s) draw upon performative traditions including call and response, improvisation, reading, throwing shade, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). My pieces extrapolate theories both from queer of color critique and Black foodways, synthesizing different dialects of an innovative visual/text languages. Mixing elements of Black foodways into my art practice has broadened my sense of what it means to reconstruct while simultaneously deconstructing the Black body. In my work, the lines created literally intersect, overlap, and make fluid many of the diasporic identities that colonial powers would have me believe are fixed. By doing this work I can reimagine ways to fight queer-antagonism, the erasure, and the deafening silences caused by colonial powers. In short, these processes of making renew the vitality of queerness and/or blackness in both my current artistic practice and in my scholarly pursuits. These performance drawings and performance writings centers Practice as Research. Meaning, not only engaging with finished work(s) like Black speculative fiction(s) or Visual Poems i.e. text-based works and/or visuals, or the criticism about these fictions, but I argue with this work similarly when I create 2D, 3D, 4D, and text-based pieces that it is equally important to practice making Black Speculative fiction(s) due to there being a scholarly and/or artistic knowing/knowledge, that is derived from the very act of practicing itself. By not considering drawing practices be they 2D, 3D, 4D, or text-based as research at the same level as finished works and/or the criticism in this field; what are we missing out on as creatives and/or scholars by privileging one form of research over the other? For these new series of performance drawings and performance writings in this alternative hybrid text, I continue to consider what moving and/or still marks do if we let them be themselves. Shout out John Cage! The pieces in these new series of works consist of pieces, short experimental films, hybrid fictions, visual poetry all incorporating African American Vernacular/Gesture English (AAVE) infused Image/Visual/Gestural Descriptions which incorporate the creation or appropriation of Fictional and/or Nonfictional Citations, plus applying queer film theory; thereby further expanding queer mark making using digital, analog, and ephemeral materials.