Here is an exploration of the intergenerational Southern Black American Body, a complex collection of persevering souls of the past, present, and faith-driven future. Through the sensorial physical encounters of my body, sometimes recalled through the physicality of another, I locate the labor to belong, the complexity of submission, sensual awakening, displacement, absence, and the expansive spiritual force of the collective body. Using documentary additions of archived family photos and journal entries, I expand and abstract the occurrence of my presence through non-linear time, connecting the personal to the complex communal. These documents are the slippery prophecies of my being, our being, that simultaneously cause, effect, and become the present-day poetic text. This work complicates desires to essentialize and understand black presence—embracing the process of becoming, seeping, seeking.

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An analysis of the surface of my paintings through Jean Baudrillard’s notion of seduction and the cool mechanism of the airbrush. I further investigate my work through the metaphor of the black mirror also known as a Claude Mirror and the connections between my work, Claude Lorrain’s landscape painting and divination through the use of reflective surfaces known as catopotromancy. Considering the notion of assemblage as outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour’s Action Network Theory I attempt to navigate the part/whole relationships found in painting, and in society.

How can we know something through how it is sensed? Making anthropomorphic, three-dimensional paintings through a set of basic, at-hand materials, I’m interested in how empathy, modesty, and doubt can mediate a tangible experience of an object. Challenging notions of perception, I want to create a heightened sense of awareness in which the intangible can be seen or felt.

This thesis and accompanying exhibit, Untitled [Distance Moving Through Me: Giselle and Marco] explores contemporary issues of displacement and our relationship to the site of home. Through the trope of a pilgrimage in the desert, both virtual and in person, inspired by the eviction and imprisonment of my paternal family from Egypt in 1956, Distance Moving Through Me: Working in Exile asks how we can use our virtual experience and changing perspectives of the landscape to our advantage for a more empathic world.

My work deals with the connection between the act of representation and conceptions of truth in the contemporary image-mediated social environment. This thesis details elements of my paintings in exchange with methods and ideas from artists and writers in order to position my aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities within a historical and contemporary framework.

We are hosts, we are hosts and we’re deeply aware of it. We are aware of the pollutants and particulates that exist in our air, aware of the growing presence of UVB radiation that touches our skin, aware of the microbes, bacteria and viruses that call our interiors home, more completely aware than we’ve ever been that to have a body contemporarily is to acknowledge a multiplicity that can be wholly uncomfortable and even alien: that we are hosts to so much seemingly unwanted material, sensation and life.

My work focuses on the reality and life of mental objects. The unseen masquerade as the seen, not only in our mind's eye but as an immediate visual experience. To realize this I apply volumetric form to models of thought and present them in a variety of environments. The forms are derived from the fields of science and mathematics, specifically geometry and topology. Topology or "rubber-sheet geometry," is the study of shapes whose essential attributes are unchanged by continuous deformation. The shapes are not defined by measurements of distance and angle, but by whether they can be transformed when bent, stretched, or shrunk. For these shapes I assemble environments which include architecture and devices from Italian Renaissance painting. In constructing the compositions I use an underlying geometric framework. The impetus for this device is that all things are hung on a structure of some sort, whether it be paint or metaphor. This device is also connected to Renaissance ideas of proving the divine through the employment of mathematics, or rather, using the tools of the exact sciences as a way of proving the unprovable. I see these arrangements as exemplifying a Metaphysics of Beauty in which the Platonic world of scientific and mathematical objects is filtered through aesthetics in what I have termed Calliphysics. Kale, from the Greek, meaning beautiful.

My thesis describes the technical processes involved in producing my work. Illustrations and diagrams complement the manuscript. The sculpture is represented by photographs. I do not intend to verbally describe what each sculpture attempts to project for itself. I have done and will continue to do sculpture because it makes more sense to me than anything else, including writing about what I have made. The investigation, planning, creating, and presentation of my work manifests itself in the object. I would, therefore, undercut this intent if I attempted to duplicate my sculpture rhetorically. The works discussed were shown at three locations: Fayerweather Gallery, November 7 to November 23 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville; Healy Gallery, January 29 to February 11 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.; Salve-Regina Building, February 14 to March 3 at Catholic University in Washington D.C. All concerned faculty, friends, and benefactors were mailed reception invitations. The description of each piece follows in the order each was completed.

In my mixed media pieces and sculptural books, I explore the significance of place. Place is not just a geographical location; it is a layered history that tells a story. My experiences in a specific environment and how I relate to it, study it, remember it, or imagine it drive me to create pieces. While the choices I make are influenced by my own experiences, I want to evoke feelings of familiarity, intrigue, and a sense of nostalgia. In my process, I intuitively layer paint, printed materials, and mixed media to make a foundation for exploration. I continue to experiment by applying more paint and developing layers of media and marks. I cut away, add to, and rework areas in an effort to build a reflection and sense of place. The process itself is as important as the outcome. The stratum of layers reveals the growth and evolution of a work and in turn discloses its own history.