In the last year my studio space has changed somewhat drastically. Since I moved into my partner’s Brooklyn apartment from where I lived alone in Queens, my studio space is smaller, sparer, and stranger. In Queens, my whole apartment was my studio. I had my sittings perch on my wine-colored futon, or lay on the deep brown covers of my bed, or sit on the geometric-designed rug on the floor. In my Queens apartment, sometimes I arranged things that were in the room around my sittings. For Michelle, I placed several of my pottery pieces at her feet with a dagger sticking out of one of the pots. For John, I placed a katana across his reclining body. I surrounded Jasmine with books and then ripped pages out of one we selected together and then I scattered the torn pages around her. Caleb lay on my bed and I sprinkled small flowers around and on him.
Here in Brooklyn, a small back room serves as my studio. My portraits in this room are stark compared to the ones done in Queens. My sittings have only room enough to sit on a small chair in front of a white, yellowing wall or recline on the unpolished wood floor. I try to dress the portraits up with a plant at a sittings feet, or a colorful shawl across a shoulder. The finished products are not the same here in Brooklyn. The color is gone. The people who come to sit are wearing white.
Before I moved in, my partner Chris used this small back room for storage. In this room, he stored the clothes of the three dead matriarchs who raised him. He stored his now grown son’s toys and a small bed, a bookshelf full of dusty paperbacks, a dresser full of old bills, a newspaper with a headline reporting the assassination of JFK. It is a room for ghosts and dusty memories. So it is no wonder that my current practice deals with memory and ghosts.