Tragic Optimism:
This structure holds me up, but God
please just let me fall one time.
How my BFA came to be and how I'm continuing my definition of upholding oneself.

With my exhibition Tragic Optimism: This structure holds me up, but God please just let me fall one time., I explore what it means to embrace hope in the face of acknowledging challenges through life’s inevitabilities: one big theme being traumas. Generational trauma, to be specific, is a big topic for me within this display and digging deeper through outer and personal research of identity and how expansive coping can look.
When I was little– maybe 4 years old, I always watched my mom journal. I read everything she wrote– I don’t think she knew I could understand it. Then, I would draw on the things she wrote. Yes, it seemed evil of me, but I wanted her inner dialog to be decorated and accompanied with friendliness. I knew her notes were yearning for hope and sticking to a determination only she could help herself with at the time. I do art now because I’m inspired by my uncles and my auntie and my siblings, yes, but I do art now to relay my voice through the one my mother always had. The voice she kept through journaling, photographing, singing, cooking, and isolating herself; surviving. Surviving is also another important notion to me as a black, queer artist whose family history is rooted in survival— as is with many other marginalized communities whose survival from suppressing institutions defined their legacies.


Everything inspires me. No, like, everything inspires me– not on any original shit but like again… y’all know nothing about that. This inspiration lives in my sketchbook for the most part. I need to document immediately and keep it recorded permanently so it lives in my sketchbook forever– or at least within my forever and that’s just as long as I live or until someone discovers my self-made archive. To utilize the sketchbook is a crucial aspect to my research: I’m confiding in my daily coping mechanisms and finding out what it is I’m soothing myself from. This is a series I adopted as my sketchbook thoughts (2023 - present) continuous archive. Diving into this, I find myself drawn to sourcing old family photos to stimulate my memories and build a composition off of– the photos serve as a template for me to pull at the strings of my brain to recall a time and reframe it in the visual conglomerate. Along with this research, I’m also finding my voice. I’m discovering what it means to be vulnerable and whether or not people can read my handwriting; I am writing various stories from the heart. These written insertions are personal, yes, but they don’t utilize singular vernacular, it is very open for general projection. This hasn’t always been the method, yet it has always been the drive. I’m trying to find something out about my upbringing and common family dynamics and social climate– I’ve always been wondering why!
When exploring this deep topic of grief, I feel as though I’m dismantling a hierarchical climate that does not want to see me succeed as a black individual, but also as a black, fem artist— which is very crucial to me when I think of fragmentation, storytelling, optimism, and documentation. There is a yearning for me to prove I fucking exist for a reason while also keeping in mind the structures that people, like my family, are constantly reinforcing within our daily lives. It’s kinda like, hey I hate that I feel abandoned by these people, but I also understand the system in which we have been assimilated to… and for that I mourn the endless possibilities of what else could have happened.


I appreciate this weird experience of vulnerability and research. Like, cool research. Research that made me want to stop using my phone completely and frolic into the sunset. I’ve learned that it’s okay to not know everything and embrace how much more I could learn. I also learned about my deep love for Google spreadsheets and how I annoyingly cannot survive without that shit anymore. Also keeping 3 calendars at one time— you know what, I think this might have been a prolonged documentation of my insanity. This shit was crazy. But it’s who I am and I will continue to do so because I think art is for the compartmentalized mind to understand. I also just think creating this body of work has been really fun for me and I am interested in seeing how this form of expression develops for me…