the inexhaustible. pt. I
song: [Sucre Sacre (Jose Marquez radio edit) - Trinidad Senolia]
The inexhaustible. reincarnated…
I love some mf musicians.
At the Door, 2025
Well, I really just love when any mf is dedicated to their craft.
This past week, I wrote down all the teachers and guides in my life that I could recall. Folks I’ve known personally or through their spirit. Places. plants. Water. Recollecting the wisdom of these guides, through the peace and the conflicts exchanged.
I’ve also been listening to an archive of musicians sharing their stories. The amount of curiosity and respect towards investment in craft over decades in intergenerational exchange is very inspiring. While most of the guests work sound, the exchange through the love of art connects beyond medium and era. In ways that don’t feel too heady or classist.
To listen and communicate like mycelium, beneath the surface of the worlds weight...
Back in October, drummer and SFJAZZ Collective member Kendrick Scott wrote a beauuutiful piece in collaboration with one of my works “The Child Opens Its Eyes to the Earth” for the de Young Collection x Svane x SFJAZZ show. During my short trip home, I was able to visit the studio while the band recorded it in prep for their performances the following week. Having tried to teach myself keys on my Casio as a kid, while also believing I could communicate with my estranged father who was a musician (how that worked out is another story). I absolutely love musician speak that I can’t even understand. (I really should take lessons).
Departures, 2025 detail
Anyways, over the years, I’ve been dreaming up ways visual renderings of sound can be created. Album cover work and design are perfect examples.
Album artwork for The Great Bailout (Deluxe) by Moor Mother
Visual renderings of the known electromagnetic spectrum that are coded/ translated/ condensed into the optic visual (understanding) light spectrum (color) such as with NASA space images. The translation of the (invisible) light is intertwined with the translator/ medium / program (human or otherwise). As individuals we similarly do this. “Seeing” and visibility are more varied – not in as just deficits – than they’re treated. Our idea of sensing is tethered to external physiological counterparts theorized or at least popularized by Plato. Senses – see “The Gut” by Elizabeth Perez. How we relate to our senses is taken for granted in how it continues to structure “our? World(s)”.
At the Door, 2025 detail
How do we see the invisibilized? No – not the invisible that isn’t for us to be seen (deep submarine). When Scott shared his notes with me in the studio the best I had to offer was “you can see”.
Blog TBC…..
GENERATION LOSS
(as in the degradation of quality between successive copies∞)
Undercurrent, detail
[Song: Black Rainbows – Jean Carne, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad]
What’s most exciting about pivoting away from social media is remembering the ability to create space and show gratitude for who and what has been important in my life. It’s like music that keeps disappearing from the internet but still exists on old hard drives and CDs.
Shifting the energy of my disappointments in the internet, I’ve been leaning on my foundational ways of connecting more (pen-pals?). But, I still think about the conditioning to rely on micro-screens to translate and experience art.
And yes, work can often heal and incite and speak volumes regardless of the platform it’s mounted on (if it possesses that energy and intent). I’ve met so many amazing people through the net and I respect various strategies for accessing art; apart of why I love a good book cover or album cover project.
Never Catch Me, detail
But I have questions beyond the benefits.
Considering how people often assess value through micro-screens, in the past couple of years, I learned how frequently I’d be positioned to address the value of (black) - in all its incarnations -with respect to the work I do. Sounds obvious but encountering more audiences that lack a baseline connection and historical outlook that my foundational audience has, it wasn’t. And there’s a large range of how those addresses have felt to me. Either end has fueled thoughts and sharpened my eye to the importance of intention and power through the practice of being an artist.
For this post, I’ll stick to the value of Black through its digital face. I’ll call it a type of generation loss.
Rhododendron, 60" x 84", photo by Zeshan
Accelerated over the past decade, I think many artists feel disappointed in the treatment of art as a silenced commodity. And, of the artist as a should-be-silent-and-a-political business owner. How social media and “the” market condense art for consumption experience on tiny screens regardless of medium exacerbates the treatment. Screens are exceptional at flattening out blacks, reflective surfaces, and all-around materiality and energy of art.
This flattening of Black though exists in various dimensions, including photographing artwork. The statement often made about my own is “It’s hard to capture your work” or “Your work doesn’t photograph well”.
Hmmm.
Undrowned, detail
I’ll get to why there’s truth in those statements, but only until a colleague mentioned Bradford Young’s work in calibrating cinematic lenses for Black skin did I realize the importance of shifting my language and perspective on the matter.
The issue of capturing isn’t rested on a photogenic “lack”. Even with my (amateur) understanding of purple fringe effect and color aberration, setting failures, etc., I know that even with a skilled photographer and powerful tech, documenting and editing work far beyond the remedial expectations of IG is faint to physical experience. With the color / non-color Black, those faults can be magnified. And while I’m aware of tech biases regarding flesh, I hadn’t transferred the read to art and the likes. Add on that everyone sees and experiences colors differently (but I guess not black because it’s supposedly not a color?).
Regardless, as seen with Young’s project, technology in its supposed neutrality is not calibrated to see black. Perhaps to “capture” but not see.
"Rhododendron (The Seven Days)", 60" x 84", photo by Zeshan
The inability to “capture” though is such a foundational point within the work that it feels like I aced a test I didn’t know I was taking. It is hard to “capture” my work because the beings do not want capturing. To capture is to seize. To possess. To take away power and one’s freedom. All in the name of “shooting” work.
How do you even “capture” a peripheral spark you see around you? How do you capture the orbs behind your closed eyelids? How do you capture bodies protected by the cover of night?
Even I have to continuously re-write my artist statement as it never really captures what it is I’m even reaching for and dancing with.
Hmmm.
But technology only reflects its maker(s). So, how are we calibrated to see?
How are we trained to see and relate to darkened space? If Black is treated more as an experience of various types of light rather than just a non-color color, how does our relationship to color and art overall shift?
What does the experience of darkened space named Black reveal and reflect back to ourselves about ourselves?
What and who needs light as our eyes adjust to the darkroom?
What if seeing has nothing to do with optics?
I’m aware this is not a new conversation for everyone. However, I do expect more investment and attention to these details. Especially in institutions. Yet, I see too often either a devaluation or a fetishization. Both ends see past the work.
And yes, again, this often depends on the audience.
"Rhododendron (The Seven Days)", detail, photo by Pat Garcia
Regardless of how much people want to dislodge Black from the treatment of Black people, culture, and religion, it is woven into a genealogy of how we see and how we imagine.
Nonetheless, I am grateful for those insights that have helped expand my thoughts around this.
Two books useful in this convo are:
Painting for the Gods: Art & Aesthetics of Yoruba Religious Murals by Bolaji Campbell and
Dark Light Consciousness: Melanin, Serpent Power, and the Luminous Matrix of Reality by Edward Bruce Bynum, Ph.D.
This is a topic I will continuously unpack (so much was cut out for this post).
⚓︎
#DEEPCUTS
#002 AUG 12, 2024
#DEEPCUTS
While this post was sure to be called #deepcuts, I was initially only going to include a few work process photos. I wanted to share the excitement of what’s beneath the surface. Like passing around black books catching notes and riffs on pages that never made the final cut and were perhaps never meant to.
Between catching up on Osunlade mixes in the studio and missing California sunsets at the ocean, my synesthesia has been feeling like the colors of bass and machetes cutting through water without making a ripple. Which for the past (somethin somethin) years I’ve been envisioning and creating ways to draw the sound of histories in space and memory.
Getting into these dimensions of the deepcut for me comes with the practice of revisiting past moments and remixing them in the present. Primarily, past moments of creating work or music (that I most definitely will never publicly share) and times outdoors where wordless conversation have been archived like a palimpsest. Although you may not [initially] be able to *read* the first layers, they are always present. Forming the foundation of the top layer - the things we easily see and hear.
Seeing through the layers/ veils calls out to the past opening a path for a response like magma cracking open the earth, pushing up crystalline ancestors that have cured in the shadows. What happens when the call and response meet is for another post…
And while there’s the assumption that this practice is neat and packaged in sunshine, revisiting can sometimes flood your pillows and make it snow in April…
Nonetheless, the 90-plus-degree heat of my studio recently created many of these deepcuts on works in progress. Like crackle paste -which I mostly hate - type cuts. My first thought was how I was going to seal them up or even cut whole parts off the panel (because I [mostly] hate crackle that much). Knowing damn well the attempts to “fix” it would mark it for the incomplete pile.
However, the charge on the first layer is the energy of lightning in a red akin to blood. Both lightning and blood carry currents and codices beyond the measure of our own lifespans and probably this earth…
There is no way to hold back currents like these so it’s no surprise they split open. In the studio, I’ve come to respect the cuts. It’s these “happy accidents” that are invigorating necessities for life and creating.
For me facing why “fixing” the crackle was viewed as a remedy became a reminder on the futility of one's audacity to even try to cover up that which one always is...
As I’m writing this, new 35mm scans are now here in my inbox. Photos from decades ago that my great aunt - the now matriarch of our family -asked me to develop. Her mother- my great-grandmother - is smiling to the camera in a few of the photos.
Telling me to remember. To revere these reveals. These re-visitings. To never hide.
⚓︎
