Artist Statement:
The artwork submitted originates from photographs taken in and around the Marine Terrace housing project in Queens, NY from 1992-2018. I photograph public housing as both a landscape of economic segregation and as a site of political awakening. The language-based work considers the connections between the personal, the political and the aesthetic, while subverting the systems of power that make some lives visible and others not. In my work, the aesthetics of containment and surveillance invite the viewer to contemplate their emotional responses to race, class and difference. The aesthetic of the ghetto is a mechanism of marginalization, containing within itself all the systemic exclusionary practices that keep the poor on the margins. The hope of my project is that visual culture could encourage the awakening of a political sensibility driven by a love ethic of collectivity and compassion, and that we can recognize the impossibility of racial justice without economic justice.
