"Liberation Practice" is a biomythographical project challenging norms around queerness, homonormativity, domestication, and Black performance. It extends my longstanding focus on archival, auto-fictive, and vernacular photography, exploring everyday life as a Black, queer, and trans person through photographs of friends, lovers, chosen family, and self-portraits. If awarded, the Lucie Foundation scholarship will fund a new vernacular photography archive displayed on a hand-built replica of the photo wall of my teenage bedroom. This wall will memorialize the home I lost in the 2008 housing crisis alongside my precious archival belongings, which I began to maintain as a preteen. Recreating this wall is an act of repatriation and symbolic of the power of memory as an essential archive. With this scholarship, my goals are to print 100 4x6 and 25 5x7 glossy images from my archive, including iPhone photos, 35mm film, and Instant film; build the 4x8ft replica wall on which the images will be installed; create a laser-etched reflective mirror sheet with a self-portrait; and use these pieces as part of studio visits with curators and, finally, to display these pieces at EXPO Chicago through the Chicago Artist Coalition AiRs booth in April 2025. I will complete the wall installation (with prints) on December 5, 2024, and the reflective mirror etching by January 15th, 2025.
