Art of Identity: Biomythography, Free Radical, and contemplating Post-Revolution Imagination
To a public assaulted with misogynistic and frivolous hipster trap, I create art to heal and share dreams of the future. “Black Power and Flowers” was the genesis of my psychedelic bio-mythography. I sought to propagate an image of myself through a painting by Haleigh Nickerson that I felt was unable to be found anywhere else. Self-proclaimed lesbian, mother, poet and warrior Audre Lorde coined the authorial strategy bio-mythography in her 1982 book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. It is a process of uniting myth, history, and biography in narrative form. Telling my stories encompassed uniting my great variance of influences. As a producer, I sonically mesh influences from Roy Ayers, Nirvana, Bill Evans, Kerri Chandler, and Pharrell into gritty bass-heavy euphoric rhythms. Studying everyone from bell hooks, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky and Tupac have concretized my pulsating sound and abstract rhymes. It is an attempt to loosen the binary. Revolution with evolution, dreams and reality, sexuality without the pornography and rage without violence. I realized I could create virtual landscapes where the sound, language and objects could unify what I do narratively. Exploring history, contradictions, my voice, my body, and experience allowed me to creatively transcend the circle and go to the future. Using these principles gave birth to FREE RADICAL, a Post-Revolution Imaginary.
Within the ability to dream is our opportunity to revolt against the standards of our existence. As a Black artist in America revolting the prisons of hyper-masculinity, racism, violence, sexism, homophobia and capitalism; it is imperative that I design with heart and purpose. My work is directly informed by hybrid aesthetics of post-modernism employed by artists who have been named as “Post-Black”. Post-Black first appears in 2001 as a result of Glenn Ligon’s conversation with the curator Thelma Golden. Golden described “…‘post-black’, at first, as a description of artists who were adamant about not being labelled as ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.“ I argue that employing this artistic approach to divorces one from essentialist notions of race to debunk the concept of Black authenticity. Post-Blackness exists as a landscape for reworking Black tropes through subverting conventional symbols of Blackness and offering a stage for alternative realities for Black subjects.
Free Radical takes the shape of this landscape. Post does not represent the demise, but the redefining stages of transition. Normalizing my uncharted perception of Black Reality disrupts the “imaginary coherence” accepted by many people who claim a dogmatic stake in racial ideals and history. Expanding our conceptions of revolution as it relates our current reality is my first concern. Second, how Free Radical imagines this new conception based on formatting a new basis of collective identity: ART. This 12-track EP is the product of me converting the pain of Black Death into a colorful portrait. Free Radical is a music album but it is more of a representation of psychic space. Tonally, melodically, and lyrically, I wanted to paint the post-revolution portrait. What happens when this is all over? It’s almost impossible to do such.
The Sonics promote vibrancy, happiness and peace amidst the rage and pain of police violence in America. Stuart Halls states “It is as if every historical moment poses a set of cognitive, political — and I would add, artistic — questions which together create a ‘horizon’ of possible futures within which we ‘think the present’, and to which our practices constitute a reply”. Every word, sound, and imaginative space I paint operate as replies; some end in periods and some with more questions. This is a portrait of our Futures Past; a digitized rainbow sky adorned with a sunflower, a nug, and heart as the sun. The great contradiction is the police car riding through my utopia.
