The Catatonia Anthologies

Harvest

Charcoal, India Ink, Oil Paint on Canvas
120 x 96 inches, started in 2014, work in progress

Harvest is presently a work in progress. It addresses three American lynchings: the lynchings of Jesse Washington (tortured and burned to death in Texas, 1916), James Byrd (dragged to death—to the point of decapitation in Texas, 1998), and the mysterious death (most likely a lynching) of Frederick Jermaine Carter, found hanging from a tree in Mississippi (2010). These three horrific incidents, I bring together to have a conversation about the foundation of spectacle violence on which America was built and continues to thrive. Harvest is a conversation about what the American society has sown (violence toward black and brown people) and what it is presently reaping (a seemingly inexplicable culture of violence)—the atrocities that American History has attempted to bury—but the ground is only so deep—or erase from its collective memory, and how the sentiments behind the nation’s horrific past, which never really died, eventually resurface. When the work is completed, the musical score to The Battle Hymn of the Republic (a hymn written during the Civil War era, that speaks in part to God’s retribution over His enemies for past wrongs) will appear inscribed on the bodies of the haunted cellist the depicted “lynch tree.” The musical score is a cynical poke at the notion of “patriotism” and “heroism,” which are both ideas that the song has come to represent for most of mainstream America, even while for many black and brown people in this nation, the history of the United States and the great atrocities that created this nation read less as “patriotic” and far more as horrific. In this installation, I am interested in the collapse of the often-telegraphed version of patriotic and moralistic American history, and I wish to challenge the notion of “American exceptionalism,” especially around the question of morality and justice.

Flying Home with Laura Nelson

This work is a fusion of African, European, and American histories and philosophies. It discusses the late Laura Nelson, an African-American woman who, along with her teenage son, was brutally murdered by a lynch-mob in the early 1900s. In this work, I resurrect Laura Nelson, who still bears a noose about her neck, as a flying figure with three simultaneous identities, and intentionally create false histories – one possibility is that she escapes death and, as in African-American slave folklore, flies back “Home” to Africa. Laura Nelson is flanked by her two other identities – one is the personification of terror (the screaming figure whose jaw is unhinged) and the other is a fattened bride named “Mfon Abasi” (Ibibio for “in the manner of God”), a personality that connotes Laura Nelson’s innocence, and the promise of her reemergence from the seclusion of the grave. Sparrows that fly across both panels function as intermediaries between Life and Afterlife and signify Laura Nelson’s awkward position as both a living and deceased figure. All of the characters are suspended above an inscribed musical score of a funerary Slave Song titled “I’m Going Home.

Flying Home with Laura Nelson
(Detail, Series: Catatonia Anthologies)

Charcoal, India Ink, Graphite on Canvas,
96 x 120 Inches, 2012

Seventeenth Cadence

The featured woman is the embodiment of several significant ideas. She represents a “fattened bride” of the mbopo sorority of Ibibioland, Nigeria. The elaborate horned crown with which she is adorned speaks to an ancient masking tradition throughout the southeast regions of Nigeria (especially in Efik territories), where outstanding “maiden masks” with their signature horned coiffure were performed by men belonging to special fraternal orders.