Voyager:deconstructionist tactics (2019) is an autobiographical and communal documentary project made from 2018-2019 between Prince George’s County, MD, and Richmond, VA. Within these photographs are friends, family members and objects within the alternative universe that is Voyager.
Structured from filmmaking practices, Voyager: deconstructionist tactics is loosely rooted from NASA’s 1977 probe of the same name that left Earth to explore Outer Space. On this probe was the Golden Record, a 12” phonograph record that carried sounds and images portraying life and culture on Earth in case intelligent life were to discover the probe. Within my own images are photographs rooted in portraiture, still lives and images that serve as “scores of production”, building a constellation of these psychological spaces, collages and experiences. Voyager was birthed out of a collage of psychological space, a culmination of socio-cultural experiences and an urgent need to see the people in my life see themselves and at an honest level of representation, candidness and openness I felt missing from the contemporary canon of photographs and images within both art history and the digital.
Photographs carry and hold psychological spaces within them. In these spaces are unloaded and unpacked histories, motifs that reference objects of personhood and tools that control how the viewer unpacks each image. The Golden Record on the original Voyager spacecraft served as a collective picture of what Earth’s collective sound was at the time. Within Voyager:deconstructionist tactics, I am building, deconstructing, questioning and preserving a psychological space that I have always known since my existence. A psychological space that does not ask for permission to exist but finds itself landing where it must, and where it has always been.
A big thanks to the friends, collaborators and additional support in the making of this work.
2018-2019