EL02 → 3D Works: Writings & Scultures
EL02
My Multi-Dimensional writings are like collages that step out into physical space. Instead of being flat, they live in layers, boxes, or built structures, almost like dioramas. I treat them the same way as my 2D writings, each seperate element in the writings are still a “word” or a “letter”, but now they sit in your space, letting you walk around the story instead of just looking at it straight on.
They’re meant to feel like motion picture stills, almost like the writing is now a movie set.
EL02 → Sculptures
This work reimagines the board game Operation. “Neg” in Haitian-Creole means “man”. I replaced the familiar white cartoon body on the table with a Black male figure, shifting the game from lighthearted surgery into something heavier and riskier. The photo-assemblage style heightens that sense of danger, pointing to how Black men have historically been dissected, physically, culturally, and even spiritually.
From the activities in Middle Passage to today, society has treated Black bodies as something to cut open, study, and debate. This piece makes that history unavoidable, even in the form of a children’s game.
"Yon Kado / Un Regalo" was my piece for a group show project I developed during art school, centered on recontextualizing trash into collectible treasures. By placing discarded pieces into small, vellum see-through envelopes, I transformed them from “don't touch me” to “please collect me”, making a comparison to how fragments of the Berlin Wall became souvenirs. The addition of packaging invites a new perspective on value and perception of found rubbish.
This sculpture started with a massive Webster’s unabridged dictionary. I carved into its cover to insert a large cross with Jesus on it, so at first glance it reads like a Bible. But really, it’s still just a dictionary.
The point was to give the tome a relic-like presence in a time when definitions feel more powerful than meaning itself. The theoretical tension is between “definition” and “meaning”. Just as definitions are rigid and fixed like the “body”, meanings are fluid, dynamic and alive like a “soul” or “spirit”.
A word is born on the street, alive in the way people actually use it. By the time it’s in the dictionary, it’s already petrified; validated, yes, but also dead.
This object asks: where is a word truly born, and where does it rest in death?
The Bwat series began in 2020, during the lockdown, when I started repurposing old boxes and combining them with my collage writing practice.
Bwat means “box” in Haitian-Creole, and the form felt like the right vessel to hold the ideas I was wrestling with at the time. Being shut in, searching for something spiritual, and reflecting on the Black experience inside and outside of confinement.
These works were never shown publicly, partly because they got lost in the current of that moment, but they are the prototype for my first album, Ultra Permanent. Looking back, the Bwat series was the first time I treated a body of work as an album, laying the foundation for how I think about scale, packaging, and sequenced narrative today.
This sculpture comes from my chess set made for Oolites 2021 group show "Where there is power", from the piece “Jwet Ameriken” (“American Game” in Haitian Creole). For that chess set I designed, I borrowed a technique from Renato Bertelli’s famous bust of Mussolini, where the figure’s face wraps around the form to suggest an all-seeing, omnipresent vision.
I applied that method to the pawns and other pieces, so when viewed from the side you see a human profile. In my version, the white pieces carried Eurocentric features and the black pieces Afrocentric ones. The game becomes more than just strategy, it becomes a map where identity, power, and history are waiting to be seen.
This work began under the title “Black Slot”. I cracked open a slot machine and replaced the usual cherries and fruit with images tied to the social climate; volatile, violent, and too often centered on the deaths of Black people as filtered through the media.
Pulling the lever became a way of reenacting the randomness and cruelty of what the headlines served us each day. As the reels stopped, the icons lined up into short narratives, read left to right like news stories, each spin forcing a new but familiar story of loss, spectacle, and survival.
This untitled piece made in 2023, is a “Black” snowman sculpted from my own hair. It plays on the word “black,” questioning how we connect identity to phenotype and, specifically, to hair. Something as innocent as a snowman becomes loaded with meaning when its form is made from the very material that defines so much of how Blackness is seen.
This work creates a confrontation between two inheritances, a switch and a song. One is a relic of discipline. The other is a loop of Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You, soft and tender. Placed together in a plush silk case, the two become inseparable with pain and comfort bound a frame.
I know the switch first hand, Its not abstract to me. I wanted to put it in a place where it could be looked at differently, even listened to differently. The headphones force you to sit with it, to feel how memory is never quite linear.
Ed Libris 2025 Miami,FL