403 Echols Ave. , 2020, Redacted digital photograph on aluminum, and custom coat hangers, 30x40
Who built your home?, 2020, Redacted digital photograph series
Homegrown, 2022, Sculpture Installation
This ongoing series of redacted digital photographs are directly informed by the public Huntsville Historic Homes Database. Each location corresponds to the compiled list of 41 properties identified in the Database throughout greater Huntsville, Alabama that either openly acknowledged or substantially implied the enslavement of Africans and African Americans historically at that property. In some cases, this information is confirmed by quoting census records but in other cases, I relied on auxiliary research into the coded language present in the archive, terms such as “servant, service wing, planter, plantation, farmer, confederate.” From this list, each of the “Huntsville Historic Home” markers placed on the properties were photographed and edited. These markers list the name of the initial or most significant European settler of the home and the date of its construction. To disarm this settler-colonial tradition, I have redacted the settler’s name from the marker and any additional information (if applicable) to recognize the uncompensated labor of those unnamed.
In a singular photo installation, 403 Echols Ave., the redacted photograph is also accompanied by two, white, custom, coat hangers with the text “Who built your home?” These coat hangers solidify the settler-colonial critique and pose a direct question to those living in these homes and those benefiting from systems whose origins are in the economies of enslavement. Further, the coat hangers reference Southern wedding décor and custom monogramming in an attempt to also expose the aesthetics emboldening a culture of whiteness and racial illiteracy. Therefore together the work asks the viewer to implicate themselves into the continuum of history and subsequently reexamine the aesthetics and impacts of generational wealth and generational trauma.
