I am a landscape artist in the most comprehensive sense, and my work encompasses the examination of geographic, social, political, and psychological landscapes. Each of my projects is considered through a lens of cultural theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other theoretical frameworks.
My current research explores the idea that collective trauma may be passed down genetically to future generations and that it can also be healed through deliberate movement, gesture, and ritual.
In her seminal book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, Dr. Joy Degruy posited that the collective trauma experienced by African slaves, in early American history, has resulted in many of the social ills facing the African American community today. Dr. Degruy goes further to describe how many of the attitudes and familial ways of interacting can be directly correlated to genetic expression in the descendants of those who were once enslaved.
As an American individual, who counts former slaves among some of my ancestors, I have contemplated the ways in which I might be able to, from an epigenetic standpoint, break the transmission of this genetic trauma. This inquiry led me to the work of Sailani, Calling, Møller et al. who in 2019 discovered that gene expression can be altered through exercise.
Hence, my current project, tentatively titled, Exercism (sic), is a series of self-portraits in which I, through performance, attempt to rid my genes of their historical trauma. My selection of specific movements and gestures is guided by their potential to reconfigure my epigenetic makeup.
Another recent scholarly achievement is the completion of a paper titled, Photography as a Mechanism of Dream Transference, which explores the proposition that photographs are visual records of dreams. The paper has garnered over 29 citations to date. The abstract reads:
“What is it that I am doing when I take a photograph? What are the implications when I exhibit the work? Expanding upon theories advanced by Sigmund Freud in his writing on dreams and the unconscious, as well as what Walter Benjamin referred to as the "optical unconscious,” this thesis explores the idea that when I take a photograph, I am making a visual record of a dream. Furthermore, when I exhibit the picture, the dream that I recorded is then transferred to the viewers via the unconscious.
As a case study, we will examine a series of photographs titled, Origin[Redux], which I created for my MFA thesis exhibition. The argument will be made that the photographs may, in part, include shared dreams that have moved between me, my mother, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston.”