MICHI MEKO
My approach to making work first exists within my own exploration of wild spaces. In 2017, I went into the Sierra Nevada Mountain range in search of a voice. I was seeking to answer a question; What does a black mans voice sound like personifying nature? Could I have the transformative moment and become enlightened in a space that has not been so friendly to black people psychologically? After 2 weeks, my answer was "NO". The landscape is marred and mangled with scars of history.
Fast forward to 2020, my pandemic was spent in wild spaces running from my personal anxieties, panic attacks and an invisible virus. During this time I decided not to make paintings or perform myself within a digital square for "likes" and thus to say that "I am here." I vanished. While the world was melting from the fires of political unrest and being ripped apart, I sat in a tent and stood in rivers making new discoveries and writing field notes.
The environment out in the backcountry was a new feeling. The isolation made it feel like I was the only Black Man on Earth. A Black male fugitive on the run, free from all.
In that freedom, its exploration, and the abstract is where and how my studio practice exist. I am an explorer, a cartographer, an abstractionist. A lone black man reporting back from the new world.