Installation
This page contains a selection of works that move beyond two-dimensional surfaces, utilizing lens-based elements as components of installations and performances related to archival interventions, domestic rituals and intergenerational communication. Click on the images to view galleries related to the work.
Antenna of the Race
The Antenna of the Race is a media-based installation that centers on three conceptual foundations: engaging Marshall McLuhan’s theory on historic labor division as a primer for thriving in an ‘acoustic environment’, the diffusion of electricity, radio, television and digital signals and a critical deconstruction of authenticity and cultural appropriation and genealogical legacies.
Sweet Exorcist
Sweet Exorcist is an installation and performance based on spiritual eviction. The systematic classification of a familial archive, the maintenance of ancestral safety buoys and the adjustment of hybrid musical instruments drive the sounding rhythm of photo based sculpture exploring the absence of a concrete linear foundation.
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
The related workshops, installation and performance concern and confront the integration prescribed by Brown Vs. Board of Education in an interdisciplinary community based project that materializes in a segregated installation of textiles and lens based works. The project confronts political, social and class-based constructs of race and integration through direct dialog between artist of different cultural, geographical and racial legacies.
Primer for Well Water
Primer for Well Water is an installation and performance that examines the social cleansing and eroding powers of water. Drawing its title from allusions to Robert P. T. Coffins celebration of American Culture in his Primer for America and from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem Primer for Blacks, the piece takes an interdisciplinary approach to collective and specifically documented identities from Afro American and Euro American inheritance, providing a primer for considering the US’s cultural inheritance.
Hand for a Hand
Hand for a Hand is an installation, performance and video related to the constructs of labor, ascension and archival intentions. The work is made in collaboration with Justin Randolph Thompson at the Contemporary Arts Center at Woodside, NY.
I’m Gone
I’m Gone is a performance and installation that reflects upon confinement and the systematic validation of archival records as a metaphor for death and escape, played out in collaborative gestures by Justin Randolph Thompson and Bradly Dever Treadaway.
Entangled Archives
Entangled Archives, an installation of 36 lightboxes framed in wood salvaged from abandoned homes after the storm, is one realization of this collective vision. Exposed electrical cords that gather in a pile of surge protectors power modest illumination of the collective mess of photographic memory. Enshrined within the worn, molded frames is a collage of images and documents: pinhole photographs of facades of abandoned homes, census records, letters and archival images that represent five generations of my family.
Piety, Independence, Desire
Piety, Independence, Desire is a series of works generated from Hurricane Katrina salvaged windowpanes and liquid emulsion photography applied directly to the glass within. Reclaimed from trash piles in New Orleans after Katrina, the windowpanes frame photographs and documents from the artist’s family archive, dating to the 1800’s in the crescent city and its surroundings. The cracked, worn and water damaged windowpanes create a narrative of imperfect memories, dusted off after years of neglect.
Floodlines
Floodlines is an experimental video, performance and installation that examines the search for and struggle to reconnect familial links lost to disaster, memory and time. The video involves two intercut elements of a ritualized performance, one centered around a grave-like mound marked with a rusted clothesline form, whose excavation by Treadaway reveals a wooden box of worn and dirty portraits made on handmade paper. The second element involves the artist submerging the excavated prints into a bucket of murky water, recalling “Katrina Muck,” or the sludge submerging the city of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.
Martirio
Martirio, or martyrdom in Italian, is a series of digital prints generated exclusively with imagery from Internet search engine results. The work focuses on traditional trades and the breakdown of traditional culture due to the evolution of technology through portraits, symbols and metaphors. Numbering near thirty in total, this selection of images accurately represents the tone and content of the work.
Magic Silver Photo Media Exhibition
"The Magic Silver Show" began in the mid 1970’s as a juried exhibition designed to encourage, foster understanding, and reward those involved in photographic media. This exhibition will present a survey of contemporary photo media in all aspects and genres of photography, film, and video. This is an open theme exhibition without restrictions on content, that will include still images, film, video, and moving images.
Drawings
Pulled form sketchbooks and designs, these images represent the process of development for projects realized and awaiting works-in-progress.