T.A.O.W.O.R.T.P.T.B.S.O.I (Gravity Pleasure Switchback)

My way of working through sculpture comes out of a photographic lens—one that questions how images resolve themselves and how they lend themselves to historical understandings of Black people existing with endless possibility and potential. I use materials that might appear ordinary but are charged with Black cultural contexts, each one carrying its own memory, danger, and possibility.

I am asking how Black futures might emerge from decay, mourning, and endurance—through electricity itself, a technology most often credited to Thomas Edison but only made possible by the ingenuity of Lewis Latimer. Latimer, whose invention of the carbon filament transformed Edison’s bulb from fragile experiment to usable light, is rarely remembered. Watching HBO Max’s The Gilded Age, I noticed how even there, his name flickers at the edges, only surfacing in quiet conversations between Black folks about electricity. That erasure feels familiar. It’s the same logic that tries to erase our migrations, our waterways, our bodies. Yet electricity, like water, like the ocean, always travels through something, always seeks a path. It is never still, never neutral, never wholly containable.

In There are other ways of remembering the past than by speaking of it (2023), I build from this current. A rusted metal innerspring mattress holds a vessel of Atlantic water; the glass was handblown and infused with charred wood taken from the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was murdered. Neon tubing traces the outline of the mattress frame, lighting its absence. A stage light projects Tyre Nichols’ hand-traced drawing of a sunset, slowly, almost imperceptibly, across the wall. Red light saturates the room, lowering ocular stress, tricking the viewer into calm, until the image appears. The work reads as sculpture but is durational performance—you must wait, unsure of what will emerge, unsure of when.

Electricity hums through all of this, not just as a material fact but as metaphor, as bloodline. To create light inside darkness from a rusted-out bedframe is to insist on possibility where there should be none. Here, I mourn Rayshard Brooks, Tyre Nichols, and countless others stolen by state-sanctioned violence. Yet I also extend an offering: of new life that comes at a price - think, milk crate challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic- of spaces for play, protest, mourning, and risk-taking. The work refuses the gap between the dead and the living, carrying their presence forward in current, in sound, in trembling light.

In this way, Latimer’s ghost is always here. Written out of history, yet every flick of light, every surge of current, is him moving through us. His absence becomes illumination, his erasure becomes energy much like mayrtrs of contemporary black movements. And so I return to the question that runs through my work often: how do we memorialize what is still ongoing? Perhaps by letting it breathe and hum, migrate like water, spark like electricity, and insist that light itself is already a Black inheritance.