I’m from Dallas, TX, where I grew up culturally, socially, and financially privileged. I come from a family of artists, educators, motivators. Despite all that my adolescence was dominated by sports, and that extended through undergrad where I focused primarily on getting to "the league" and second on school/art. Long story short, I got hurt my senior year, in the first quarter of the first game. At that time I acutely experienced the pimp whore dynamic that dominates collegiate and professional athletics. Tired of the "run nigga run" life I was living, I re-evaluated and focused on being an artist, a world citizen, and an amateur linguist. At the time, I decided that my goal as an artist was to use media to construct a culture. In this dictum I defined culture as: "a bank of information that will positively change people's behavior." out of that idea, (and several others) myself and my best friend James Bartlett started The Fly Movement, which is an organization that is trying to amagamate all the flyness in the world and make it easier to access.
After living in South Africa for 8 months, I went directly to Grad school at NYU to pursue my MFA in studio art. There I focused on building an art practice, most of the work I produced while there was video, performance, and installation. Thematically most of that work is cented on what I call, "The Poetry of The Banal." Most of my exercises in this mndane poetry used experiences with the women in my life as narrative springboards. After graduating I moved to Paris, France where I am currently expanding my practice to make work that poeticizes the marginalized experiences of the proletariat.
* I decided to not front like I didn't write this thus the highly unorthodox first person passive voice. T
EDUCATION
2007 M.F.A., New York University
2005 B.A., Northeastern University, Boston, MA
FELLOWSHIPS AND RESIDENCIES
2008
Harriet Hale Wooley Art Residency, Foundation De Les Etats Unis, Paris, France
2008
SWAMP emerging filmaker fellowship, Houston, Texas
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2007
Sleep Awake, The Rosenberg Gallery, Manhattan, NY
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2007
Surveyor, Ad Hoc ArtSpace, Brooklyn, NY
Look Away, Cynthia Broan Gallery, Manhattan, NY
NYU MFA 2007, 80 Washington Sq. East Galleries, Manhattan, NY
SCREENINGS
2007
How Would You Feel? // Film // DV // 80 minutes
The Fly Movement spring screening series, Cantor Film Center, New York, NY
The Boston Underground Film Festival, Cambridge, MA
The Golden Lion Film Festival, Swaziland, South Africa
2005
Exorcising Rejection // Film // DV // 8 minutes
Shown on BETj series The Best Shorts Showcase
Winner best film at The Bryant College film festival, Providence, RI
Official selection: BHERC film festival LA, CA
Right Eye film fest Cape Town, South Africa
One day, when I was around 13 years old, I lost my wallet. It was a leather wallet with one of those punk chains that attached to your belt loop, it was also embossed with a silver 8 ball. At the time I erroneously assumed that the wallet contained nothing short of my entire life. It identified me, held the currency that fed me, gave me access to the gym etc... I was distressed, I tore my house apart looking for my wallet. After searching and re-searching several times I decided to turn to my faith. I had been taught that if I needed something I could always turn to god/Jesus and they would form a committee and deliberate, see if my request was worthy, process my papers, and eventually fill my humble human request. Without haste, I found my way to my knees and prayed as hard as I could that the location of my wallet be revealed to me.
The story gets hazy after that but I know that somehow, after I prayed, I very easily located my wallet.
One day when I was twenty two I was about to get on the bus, I saw a silhouette of a woman not so far away. She got on the bus and we stared at each other for a while, I attempted to get her attention without saying anything. At some point while I was trying to talk to her telepathically I thought I sensed her talking back. A little background information: I had been taking that bus everyday for 5 months and had never seen her. After that first evening I saw her, I thought about her all the time, a fairly standard fantasy of the romance that could exist between us repeat over and over in my daydreams. The next day I saw her on the bus again we had another attempt at a telepathic conversation, this happened again the next day, and the next day.
The story gets hazy after that but I know that somehow, after I thought about her and saw her every day, we very easily grew into a romantic relationship.
If you think about something hard enough under any pretense, religion or romance, it tends to happen.
The purpose of this list is to inform people who might be able to collaborate with me on certain projects of my needs.
People always ask me this so I feel compelled to formulate a standard answer.
The Fly Movement is an organization that aims to catalouge, and promote all the fly artist in the world regardless of what media they work in. When I say fly I mean free, in Fly MVMT dogma the physical act of flying is a metaphor for the ability to move in any direction at will without outwardly imposed resistance.
In the Art world this resistance or "gravity" has primarily manifested itself as commerce. Every genre of art making, be it visual art, music, film, or theater follows an archetypal money generating model, in which a corporation or business (i.e. record label, production company, art gallery) employs an artist to produce work which they in turn find ways to distribute and sell. Normally, for their labor they are compensated exponentially more than they in turn compensate the artist. Because a corporation's primary goal will always be to sustain itself by turning a profit, it is in their interest to employ artist who will create art that functions primarily as product, to be bought and sold. Thus, creating art within the frame work of commerce, with profit as the primary motivation, has become a corrosive hindrance on the practice of art making. Art as commerce has in short, ransacked the quality and originality of nearly all art distributed by or associated with corporations.
Fortunatly there are artist who continue to make art work indpendent of the resistence (gravity) of commerce. A Fly artists work functions primarily as personal expression of ideals as opposed to product. Obviously, in most cases their art can and should function as product as well. The main distinction is that an artist who is truly independent can create without money influencing their practice.
Additionally we aren't haters, and we recognize that there are a plethora of anomalies, or artist who have managed to maintain their independence / flyness while remaining inside the archetypel commerce model. We celebrate them as Iconoclasts who have managed to resist the trappings of their environment.
us phone // 347 451 2629
france phone // +33 14 721 0535