The Untouchables are paintings, drawings and non-linear narrative videos that investigate the contemporary political realities of global race identity and the shifting relationship between spoken and body language, memory and trauma, cultural traditionalism and social displacement.
The paintings and drawings are collages that weld together into a visual framework deconstructed and juxtaposed printed texts, family portraits, contemporary news items, and historical images out of popular culture. The hybrid non-linear narrative videos are superimposed paintings and drawings on old 8mm film home movies from Haiti, Benin, Jamaica, United Kingdom and France. I assemble experimental sounds, constructed languages, and staged performances to address systematic violence and killing. The imagery speaks directly to post-soul Afro aesthetic themes within the Afro-Caribbean community: dialect, skin tones and body language all act as narrative signifiers.
Sound and narrative in the non-linear videos are approached by way of two distinctive processes: first, the creation of an artificial language by merging four separate languages, two traditional Western languages and two Creole post-colonial dialects-I use French, Haitian Creole, English and Jamaican Patois and remix texts from Caribbean travel logs and Haitian and Jamaican folklore; second, an experimental soundtrack in the tradition of John Cage, using ballads of Haitian and French origin, European classical music, French and American Hip Hop, as the vehicle of the story.
The paintings and drawings are collages that weld together into a visual framework deconstructed and juxtaposed printed texts, family portraits, contemporary news items, and historical images out of popular culture. The hybrid non-linear narrative videos are superimposed paintings and drawings on old 8mm film home movies from Haiti, Benin, Jamaica, United Kingdom and France. I assemble experimental sounds, constructed languages, and staged performances to address systematic violence and killing. The imagery speaks directly to post-soul Afro aesthetic themes within the Afro-Caribbean community: dialect, skin tones and body language all act as narrative signifiers.
Sound and narrative in the non-linear videos are approached by way of two distinctive processes: first, the creation of an artificial language by merging four separate languages, two traditional Western languages and two Creole post-colonial dialects-I use French, Haitian Creole, English and Jamaican Patois and remix texts from Caribbean travel logs and Haitian and Jamaican folklore; second, an experimental soundtrack in the tradition of John Cage, using ballads of Haitian and French origin, European classical music, French and American Hip Hop, as the vehicle of the story.