Before
Before: Play, Process, and Fragments
This body of work belongs to a different era—one of layers, scattered circles, and playful motion. It was a time of experimenting with form, tracing connections between past and present, precision and imperfection. The drawings, the digital remnants, the mapped-out compositions—each was a way of processing, of translating memory into mark-making.
There are echoes of DNA here—not in strands, but in pixels and ink. The blown-up dots-per-inch behave like genetic code—patterns letting me see my family again, somehow.
There are the representations of the tools of my mother’s business—space planning stencils, measured arcs, and careful curves—repurposed for something far less rigid, intuitive, and making room for accidents.
And then, there is the joy. A period when my son was growing up, when my work held a looseness, a curiosity, a kind of whimsy. But beneath that joy, there were ghosts. Many of these images were made in the wake of Katrina. New Orleans, my hometown, with its waterlines and its slow unraveling, became a reflection of something more personal. I found myself returning to my sister’s death from decades prior. In these images I was sifting through memories, piecing together fragments of a past that refused to stay fixed and was now underwater.
These pieces were about process—about feeling my way through image-making and about pulling from the physical and digital worlds to create something that felt real.
A past self, a different rhythm— but still connected to the now.