For the Black Queer Bodies in Motion.
We who are Young, African, Gifted and Queer.
In between familiar yet estranged places, seeking strange homes in other faces. I encountered the portraiture of myself and the people who I met while hopping couches, homes, places, a means to cope with the anxieties and growing pains amidst the isolation, disorientation(s), queer explorations, and coming of age of my early twenties.
Here is a story of a community built in motion – fluid. Here is the story of seeking care, gentility, intimacy. Here is the journey to enunciate Black/Queer/Diaspora through portraiure as a space to lay bare our desire to be held and to hold, to play and to heal.
You Say You Want to Hold Me (2022)
HOLD - for healing.
HOLD - for the ways friends, strangers and I grew to hold each other close, well, carefully. For our creative energy to make joy, catharsis, and intimacy & to be well and be loved.
Here lies a story of hands: uttering softly, gently, beautifully; to capture their vitality, yield to their intimacy, their poetry, their poetics (always) of relation: a story of a community’s emergent strategies of care in beatific light, solemn shadow, petal and thread.
COR DENTATUM (2022) with Jephtha
Cor Dentatum
Written by Jephtha
Written by Jephtha
My masculinity died in September of 2019 – and its convincing life culminated (and dissipated) in a single eye shadow palette. With every shade, I shed a skin from molting aimed at molding me into the man my mother thought her son would one day become. With every glitter, a glaring, glimmering plot hole in the script of machismo was revealed to me, until I understood the futility of the entire act. In front of the mirror, I saw a new future wherein I could move on without my guard. Or did i guard him? I used him for safety, but I also shielded him from being ravaged, picked apart by my own heart. Who knew a heart could have teeth. COR DENTATUM. Well, my core was dented by the weight of expectation – glory be, but now I grieve.
Do I?
