Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My practice is anchored in inquiry, experimentation, and collaborative research, while exploring new strategies for framing identity, history, and socio-political constructs. Often resisting traditional lens-based structures, I blend conceptual image-making with post-documentary and interdisciplinary methods. I construct compositions and platforms that disrupt fixed narratives, inviting viewers into open-ended spaces of imagination, reflection, and dialogue. As a self-taught visual artist, I forge a unique photographic language, in black and white, to interrogate the dynamics of power and memory at the intersection of the intimate and the political where photography becomes an act of resistance. My practice, informed by a reflection on African identity, brings out poetic tensions between visibility and invisibility, between imposed narration and sensitive re-appropriation..

While At Headlands

While at Headlands, I plan to engage in two projects from Lagos, Nigeria and the United States. This time would mark the end of one project as I finish the development of my first photobook for the project ‘Lagos: The History of Quietude’ as well as the beginning of another project in the United States entitled ‘I Have Struggled with Joy All My Life’. A project that center’s a personal inquiry as an outsider: What is joy in America? and Why is depression so extensively documented as a cultural phenomenon, yet joy remains largely unexamined? Using a multimedia approach, it would also examine how America has been shaped by narratives of racism, justice, and politics and how these forces continue to define our collective relationship with the social landscape.