MAS MAN

BLANC GALLERY

SUMMER 2021

Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal. We see, therefore, that the colonized people, caught in a web of a three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences, are soon logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary. —Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom: part 3, chapter 22, "Why we use violence". 1960

I want to PROTECT my neighborhood.

I live in Southside Chicago where violence frequently happens. On any given night, I can hear bullets blast asunder and the sounds of tires screeching into the distance. Sadly, walking pass the death site of a fallen young black man is a regular experience for me. Perhaps, this is why I barely watch the evening news or television altogether. We could say the media is responsible for exploiting the black community's misfortunes and absolutely mention the systematic racism that undergird the creation and Constitution of the United States of America. However, being burned, castrated, denied, enslaved, erased, lynched, miseducated, murdered, silenced, pillaged, and raped has left generations upon generations of African Diaspora descendants perpetually burdened, yet resiliently resourceful.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic exposed America’s discordant existence and fragility as a global titan, perhaps the most poignant and disturbing event of 2020 is the live murder of George Floyd and the unjustifiable death of Breonna Taylor. The violence that helped to form this nation continues take form as the nation is constricted financially. While some prepare for a NEW WORLD, others are feverishly seeking to hold on the scraps from the obliterated past. The past is showing up again as prophesied desperation and tensions swell into an era of candle light vigils, mass incarceration, mass shootings, police brutality, peaceful protests, and destructive riots to further mystify the citizens as well as the aliens of America.

As a descendant of the Trinidad and Tobago, I began to reexamine my relationship with my own body, its origin, as well as its mortality. Death in large numbers have become a deep concern for us all while provoking us to question how we exist now and into the future.

How do we PROTECT ourselves from something we can not visualize?

As a ‘front line’ worker in a world renowned hardware store, I was unshielded from covid and the aforementioned violence in my neighborhood. That summer, I produced several masks that double as crowns from discarded boxes from my job. I find connections with the material I find for my MAS COMBINES. There is an innate interaction and interrogation that happens when I discover and reintroduce materials to what I am making. The opportunity to use the familiar and temporal cardboard hit different that summer. I felt the essential worker, majority whom were black or brown, finally deserved to be elevated in the same regard. In my opinion, we were all heroic and probably just trying to survive a classist system or PROTECT and provide for our families.

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Dirty Hands: act 5, scene 3. 1963

We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

— Malcolm X, 1965

BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY is a compacted collection of works  focusing on introducing and reimagining Blackness in America as a hero archetype. Inspired from my carnival technique of ‘wire bending’ and Afrofuturism, I have the opportunity to express my emotions and thoughts presently, as well as create the armors carefully crafted for the hero's protection. I am utilizing the Asante Twi (Akan) Sankofa principle of 'looking back to thrust forward' in order to embrace the imagined possibilities. I am contextualizing a black heroism rarely experienced through imagination, invention, and the investigation of magic and ritual.

BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY combines sculpture, painting, photography, as well as performance while particularly grounding it from my experience as a MAS MAN (carnival artist) as well as Bondage, Discipline, Sado/Masochism (BDSM) master. I am very interested in using the metaphors of life as opportunity to form commentary or conceptualize incomprehensible realities we face. Elucidation and illumination of the state of the world is prominent modality of traditional MAS or masquerade. Internally, I create the future that I see presently by transferring downloads from my mind to simultaneously instruct the blood, bones, muscles and nerves in my body. This notion thrusts me into my formidable medium of MAS (carnival art). When I am creating MAS, I am fashioning several artistic disciplines in a way that is ritualized and traditional, then release them into the world as sigils and opportunity for transcendent arrival.

Rauschenberg famously stated that “painting relates to both art and life,” and he wanted to work "in the gap between the two.” I am constantly considering how transcendence occurs when one imbues a wearable piece and how the shell can be a vehicle of transcendence for the human body. I am consistently considering the phrase, 'As above, so  below" in how my work communicates with the body as well as with the environment. I am harnessing materials and subjecting them to acrylic mediums in order to produce Afrofuturistic sigils that also underscore the possibilities of paint. I approach my practice as a person influenced by mystic sciences, such as alchemy, astronomy, and numerology as well as movements like Abstract Expressionism, Neo Expressionism, Neo & Junk Dadaism, Jazz, Reggae, Soca, Street Art/Graffiti, Pan Africanism and Queer art studies.

Using my signature steel harnesses as a gesture to suggest the body could be considered transient in this life just as a bystander may view the carnival ritual for a moment in time until it disappears from view. I also pointing to inhibition and restraint as protection. I am working with my obsession for fighting against the oppression of Black men in America and throughout the African Diaspora while working with my obsession of the black male body. The dissonance manifests into these works of armor. I am directly responding to the injustices that have been happening to melanin skinned people for centuries. Therefore, I create monuments that can be standards for Afrofuturism and conceptualism that isn't static. In fact, there are several allowances for change and evolution to occur within the metaphorical mediums used. 

When I am wearing the armor and materials that I make on my body the physical activation of the images, makes these materials fluid and changing, the static object becomes the activated object, and the materials become activate by my movements and performance. Whether seen live, as a recorded image, or in resting state, I am creating a fusion of material, ideas, living materials, and the living body. Although, it is said that the overall idea is more important than the material that is use in the world of dematerialized conceptual art, the mediums and materials I use act as metaphors for greater things to give further meaning to the work.