Good to me as I am to you
My work turns Richard Prince’s Untitled, Cowboy inside out, asking what appropriation means when the cowboy is Black and when time itself becomes material. Rather than the fixed bravado of Prince’s image, I stretch duration until it nearly breaks, slowing a 37-minute reel of Black Rodeo into something closer to stillness, a slide show of breath and pause. Time here is sculptural, erotic, resistant. The piece reverses Eadweard Muybridge’s leap from photography into cinema, moving instead from cinema back into the photograph, where Black presence lingers in suspension rather than rushing forward toward disappearance.
I return to my own migrations, from the rural South where I was raised to Northern cities where I learned to make a life, and I ask what architectures—both literal and figurative—hold us inside those transitions. The installation gathers objects that carry touch and memory: balloons drifting in a glass case, a weathered rug, pillows for resting on the ground, and a subwoofer that carries Aretha Franklin’s voice deep into the ribcage.
When the work was first exhibited in Winnipeg, the installation became a place of gathering. People slowed down together, laying their bodies on the floor, letting the thump of Aretha’s voice and the drag of the slowed film wash through them. I want the work to create that same pause again, a moment of slowness that allows people to consider their own relationship to pleasure, place, and maleness, and to feel how time itself—stretched, bent, undone—can be a ground for intimacy and gathering.