In 2024, I held my first solo exhibition GATHER, GATHER, GATHER which was given a home at Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center in St. Paul, MN.
GATHER, GATHER, GATHER is an expression of what it means to be a child of many diasporas and many Indigenous lineages. I explore what it means to live a postcolonial existence: one in which I must engage my imagination to expand my sense of what is possible. In disavowing impossibility, I find that my creativity offers a direct line to communicate with ancestors and loved ones who no longer share this physical plane with me: the storytellers, culture bearers, teachers, makers, rebels, elders who guide my hands, thoughts, and vision, so that I may do the same for those who will call me ancestor.
Gather, Gather, Gather is a prologue, scene-setting, to the story of the Traveler, a being traveling across and through space and time to find their ancestors and homes. These are the seeds of the Traveler's story.
The exhibit's title hints at my process in creating this show: it is an accumulation of two years of creative experimentation, world building, knowledge and memory invention, and the archives of ephemera that tie me to my ancestors and my younger self.