Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My practice is about home, community and (be)longing. I reimagine and hybridize landscapes that center boundless Black and Caribbean existences taking up space and forging new realities of being. My process involves exploring the effects of migration, human impact on the environment, and the expansive possibilities of world-building. Pulling from elements of my hometown Brooklyn and ancestral homeland Haiti, I melange landscapes and ultimately question, how does the diaspora continue to place their trust in envisioning new pathways of existence? How does one reinvent home away from home?

In my work, I craft my own mythical language and challenge the constraints of the current landscape. Nostalgic portals appear referencing my origins and lineage, striving to genuinely portray the diaspora. Simultaneously, I’m designing blueprints for sovereign futures.

While at Headlands

During my stay at Headlands, I will be working between painting and installation to explore the evolving relationship between the Haitian diaspora and the traditional communal system known as the lakou. I will create reimagined and hybridized landscapes that merge ancestral memory with contemporary diasporic realities. These works will visualize lakous as living, shape-shifting spaces, part real, part mythic, part speculative. My project will be grounded in both research and intuition: drawing from oral histories, archival photographs, and familial memory, while allowing space for imaginative interpretations of what home and land-based kinship can look like moving forward.