A Cleansing Ritual:
(2024)

Collage on glass with vintage frame; vintage magazine images, synthetic hair, hair pick, roller

A layering of standards, expectations, and aesthetics placed on black women and femme’s bodies. Narratives of labor; specifications of how we’re told to perform and present our bodies to the world; we find ways to be subversive and live in the midst of such hollow barometers. I fail to succumb to the expectations of Western society and whiteness daily. And I thank divine for this. I remind myself consistently that I can disappoint the agenda of respectability politics.

This collage is comprised of images from Ebony magazine beauty and hair advertisements – these ads typically promote limiting, homogenous expressions of gender. There are also images of women featured in an erotic calendar advertisement, which I also found in an Ebony magazine. The advertisement expresses such imagery was crafted for the male gaze. I am using these images to further subvert, challenge, and highlight the complexity and diversity in how black women and femmes express gender and show up in the world.

This collage also includes a horse and mule advertisement, synthetic hair and a hair pick encased in plastic material, sewing pattern pieces, a hair roller and pin, tulle fabric, matches, and a note reading, “you don’t get to tell me what to do.”

I explored this composition outside of the canvas’s boundaries by creating a small installation around it. I placed my great aunt’s wash basin in front of the collage and surrounded it with tealight candles, bringing the viewer into a meditative moment. This is a cleansing ritual; washing the wounds caused by the expectations of Western society, patriarchy, and misogyny; a return to ourselves.