Mixed media installation. Refuge describes a shelter from pursuit or danger. A moment, place or time where surrounding and mounting pressures and fears are obscured. A gilded archway where one may take cover and reflect. 

Refuge 

'Wild Swimmers' 'Wild Swimmers' is a highlight of a past relationship. often remembering a glimpse of the good, we ignore everything else, or it is blurred and forgotten. 'Wild Swimmers' is a reimagined memory.

Wild Swimmers

Fotografía urbana en la ciudad de Madrid

the routine_

The figures in this image intended to capture the interaction that might be found in a city’s streets, but were taken out of their environment to highlight movement and make it relatable to all current settings as crowds and large gatherings were generally not occurring due to lockdowns.  

Mementos of a Past Life, No. 2

When I considered the theme of this exhibition what felt most relevant was considering what in my practice has been worked on when I was younger but have come back to, and what I work on in little snippets of time. I’ve recently come to back to collage, and over the past several months I find myself working on them here and there. I give myself small goals at work, and then work on collages for a few moments. Oddly, at work is sometimes when I have more time to create Art as my 3 year old has left little time for creation. I feel like that might be changing as we have begun to work on scissors skills and I hope that sometime soon he and I will be building these collages together.

Star Child

Hip hop 3

This painting was made during the Litlle bird artsit residency in the village Leshten in Rodhope mountain, Bulgaria. The title is inspired by a poem written by the bulgarian poet Boris Hristov.

The hill

Painted during the Covid-19 time of curfews and quarantine, I painted it as a reminder of what awaited us soon ahead, on the other side of the pandemic restrictions and the long colder months. I wanted to represent the nostalgia of summer and to portray a metaphor for summer inviting us in. Inspired by Joaquín Sorolla and his use of light and depiction of shadow and reflections, using subtle lilacs and deeper mauves.
I wanted the composition to be simple and uncomplicated, and I wanted it to be something quintessential of the Mediterranean during summer. Somewhere warm and familiar.
The staircase serves as the invitation to enter into the scene, into summer. And the colour palette I chose was to I chose the colour palette to help spark these memories – to be reminiscent of that familiar afternoon summer light on the Mediterranean coast, that embracing warmth of the sun, and those relaxing azures of the water.
With this painting, I wanted to trigger a warm and contented memory for the viewer but also more than that, I wanted to trigger a feeling – a longing.

Back to Begur

"Sadness"

Universal

How do humans perceive borders? It can be a grey line on a satellite map; it can be a stamp and a date on the visa page of a passport; it can be rows of concertina wires mounted around the border wall stretching for miles; or it can be an unmarked stream meandering along the ravine. 

Each day, CBP agriculture specialists across the nation seize approximately 3,000 prohibited plants, animal byproducts, and seeds. Plants which are not compliant with the import and export legislation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES ) are confiscated. These plants are taken care of by The Plant Rescue Center program, initiated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1878. Each individual species is reviewed by the authority, then regularly assigned and sent to botanical gardens, arboretums, zoological parks, and research institutions in the United States.
Confiscation can happen for a variety of reasons: “not every plant is smuggled intentionally. Sometimes it is just a matter of not having the proper paperwork, just like people going border to border without visas," notes Kyle Wallick, a botanist at the U.S. Botanic Garden.

Throughout history, the displacement and transfer of plants and seeds around the world went hand in hand with the forced migration of human labor. Thus the very act of planting, gardening, and cultivating plants can be seen as a form of colonial violence. Ordering, naming, organizing and trading plant species has been integral to ordering the wealth of an empire since the eighteenth century. As a scientific discipline and a taxonomy, botany also became a vast and profitable enterprise as a consequence of the colonists’ exploratory voyages. If the capture and classification of exotic species reinforced the primacy of colonial systems of science over indigenous forms of knowledge, then the botanical garden itself becomes a colonial laboratory. Migrated plants, enacted as archetypes of the foreign, each project a colonial ideology. To this day, plants continue to be transferred from one garden to another, often for political and especially diplomatic reasons, yet it is the political system which imposes ever stricter border regulations regarding the import and export of native and non-native plant species.

Dendrobium sp. is an artistic research project supported by the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT. The project adopts a first-person perspective of a dendrobium plant, whose exact identity has not yet been confirmed by botanic experts. The CITES-restricted plant’s journey of dislocation is documented as a personal history: from the regulation and confiscation by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to its release and transfer to the Botanic Garden of Smith College. The viewer is moved through a series of field visits and investigations, exploring the plant's geographic origins, medical properties, cultural identities, international travel histories, pictorial representations in specimen archives, and its temporary home at the botanic garden.

The project takes the form of a book, printed by risograph on standard herbaria papers and bound by sewing threads and medical bandages. The design of the book is inspired by the way in which one specimen of dendrobium has been presented at Harvard University Herbaria, which is but one of 1,800 unidentified dendrobrium species in the world.

Random errors produced by the Riso printer - ink scuffs and misalignment under layers of printing plates - perfectly resonate with the shifts in and misrepresentations of the Dendrobrium plant’s identity throughout its attempted classification and continued displacement. The X-ray-like monochromes printed on the semi-transparent sheets are simulated 3D models generated from hundreds of 2D photographs of the plant and its surrounding environment in the botanic garden. The documentation aims to unfold the Dendrobrium’s memory of traversing temporal and geographical borders while constantly being scanned by surveillance cameras and X-ray detecting machines. 

As William J. Mitchell mentioned in The Reconstructed Eye, "The early development of the technology coincided with the era of space exploration, so digital imaging systems quickly began to play much the same role in twentieth-century voyages of discovery as topographic and botanical artists had played in 18th-century ones: they reported previously unseen marvels and inventoried potentially colonizable territory." In the context of a pandemic where voyage and discovery have been put on pause, observing the journey of this one Dendrobrium across borders asks us to consider: as supposedly global citizens, how should we respond to the colonial power structures embedded in border plant policing systems today? How do we disentangle the complex sociocultural, political, and ecological histories of planting and gardening? How might the history of plant migration inspire a new way of looking at human migration?

Dendrobium sp.

I shot Kesse Ane Assande Elvis Presley, or simply coined as "Britney Spears" by her friends, along with Mohamed, aka “Baba”  for a new personal series entitled "The Queens of Babi".
The series was created after meeting and talking with the members of Abidjan's drag community, and discussing how to highlight their talent and creative passions. For a duration of two years, until 2018, members of the drag community in Abidjan would meet discreetly in an undisclosed bar to attend drag themed events, where they would parade and show off their finest creations to each other and members of a jury. A winner would be picked at the end of each event. The group has now disbanded due to adversities, but their desires to create and self-express remains. I chose to highlight the only two winners of these competitions, as after talking to them, their personalities just stood out to me. What came out of my this were outfits that were made, fittingly, under the theme of royalty. All creations were imagined by themselves and crafted from scratch, which was amazing to watch as I received their photo and video updates. Both have ambitions that reach beyond drag. Britney wants to be a model and an actress, be an international drag queen, have her own life and freedom to do what she wants, and most importantly, be proud of the life she leads. Baba would like to own a fashion company, start a family and work in the entertainment industry. Regular desires, that would normally be attainable to any person whose gender and identity would be deemed “acceptable” to carry these out within society’s confines. Both are also aware of the difficulties of work such as this in Côte d'Ivoire - from the costs, to finding a tailor who would agree to work on their outfits, and premises that would host without fear of backlash. All these remarks sadly point to the elephant in the room: The culture of drag and LGBTQ identity is still not as readily accepted within the confines of modern African society.

The Queens of Babi

The Divine Feminine - Empowerment

Autumn

Sky House, 2014.
Oil, manila pattern paper, and bolt fabric on birch wood panel, 20 x 20 inches.

Sky House

In this work, three vintage Kennecott Copper Corporation billboard ads show narratives of economic prosperity and job creation that circulated widely during the dawn of industrialization. The billboards sit on top of slag waste piles and have embedded animations that illustrate a starkly different reality. Elements of the poster slowly begin to move in the animation to illustrate the labor strikes, abandoned houses, and environmental degradation in mining towns today.
The visual differences exemplify the disconnect between what was promised to these communities and the material living conditions the towns were actually left with.

Years of Life lost (we are within the waste)

2021
Black ambrotypes in artist's frames, diptych

Lazy Semaphores

NATURE MORTE no.2 à la dérive (STILL LIFE no.2 DRIFTING) is part of the DRIFTS DRIFTING PHASE II installation project which is currently on progress. The installation proposes a questioning of human and artistic drift, a theme that Anne-Marie Giroux has been exploring since 2014\. Taking a critical and mocking approach on the relevance of the very essence of the art object, the artist also questions the relevance of being an artist and most specifically, the relevance of being a woman artist. Composed of three-dimensional works developed with traditional mediums and recycled materials, the installation will be presented as a still life, fragmented with multiple « self-portraits » of the artist and her art, adrift. The project will be presented publicly for the first time at Espace PRODUIT RIEN in April 2023 in Montréal (Québec) Canada.

Photo: Paul Litherland

Still life no.2 drifting

Through the medium of oil paint my work captures imagery of the everyday in New York City to highlight the dystopian reality of 2020. My practice focuses on the screen as a surface of mediation, protection, isolation, safety, and fear. Together we acknowledge the courage of our essential workers during these unprecedented times, and their protection of and service to the community at large. I recognize the screen as a barrier and charged index that both separates and unites us. This physical boundary functions as a space from which to consider our privilege and reflect upon our position as human beings during these unprecedented times. It is a barrier that mediates the body and incites questions regarding human desire and fear: the inability to touch during a global health crisis and the longing to connect.

Untitled (07/16/2020)

As a textile artist, I use materials, textures, imagery, and senses to evoke place and time. This year in particular, I tried to bring a feeling of comfort back to the isolated existence I experienced in America in the midst of a global pandemic. I wanted to make my home in India almost palpable- within my reach.

Working on the jacquard loom and embedding a textile with spices common in my family’s cooking allowed me to capture the comfort of scent; just the smell of a spice can trigger fond, powerful memories. Now these textiles can envelop a space with the scent of spices, but have also become meaningful objects that can be folded up and taken with me wherever I go, as a reminder of home and the warmth it brings.


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