Memorial for Souls Can’t Go Home is a multisensory installation made of all the objects typically found at roadside memorials; ballons, flowers, stuffed animals, candles and photography. In this work, artist Orlando Thompson questions what happens to a soul when it’s forcibly removed from its host body due to one of the many systems of violence and opression that continue to plague Black people. Upon entering the installation you are met with the sounds of Lake Martin, followed by the fragmented, indecipherable sounds of human voices emanating out in an ominous ensemble of noise akin to crickets in a field. The room is dark and your eyes will need to adjust. Your presence disturbs the peace of the sculptures and their songs begin to pause as you approach them. When you move closer, you see the objects, faintly lit by candle light, in more detail. You notice yourself noticing, and the objects notice you too. Thompson says, “I see a lot more makeshift memorials being erected in remembrance of people killed in malicious ways. I imagine their souls gain density, keeping them bound to this planet and unable to ascend to what is beyond the physical. This project explores what a dense soul might look like and how it would behave...”

Memorial For Souls Can't Go Home, 2022. Multi-sensory, mixed media installation. Vinegar Projects, Birmingham, AL.

I was invited by Sophia Al Maria to contribute work to her exhibition INVISIBLE LABORS  dayjob therapy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. I made same | emas, a resurected documentary movie project about a Mathaf security guard. The movie is a mix of our interview from 2012 as well as footage I captured  in 2002 of my own family. It was a heavy handed way of blurring the boundaries  that separate his family and his story with my own.

Sophia Al-Maria: INVISIBLE LABORS daydream therapy is an exhibition that centres dreaming as a methodology to engage with personal and contested histories of labor and creativity and how that relationship to expendable labor and free time has translated into the contemporary moment in the Gulf. Foregrounding the importance of storytelling and speculative narratives as strategies for survival, imagination and reclaiming futures,Together with collaborators old and new (photographer Aparna Jayakumar, sound artist Joe Namy, musician Kelsey Lu and many other contributors named in the work entitled Credits), Sophia Al-Maria converts the exhibition space into a site for complex, poetic, imagined and true stories — bridging the present, past and future tense of Doha, Qatar, a city with many historical and geopolitical chapters of labor migrations that continuously alter its future and past.

My photography is documentation of places my body has existed. For the last two years I've used 35mm half frame cameras to make photographs. Two images on every frame, each frame is a diptych. These photos are moments I am compelled to stop, compose and make a picture. Two photographs living on a single frame. They start as individuals but are here to tell their stories as one. And through their stories I discover a greater understanding of the photo's subjects and myself.

I Am There, 2018. The Darkroom, St. Louis, MO.