Over the past several months, I have found myself in a period of distance from my practice, working to reconnect while navigating changes within my personal life. Recently, I have begun to re-engage with that work, and with that comes the decision to share a project that has been developing for nearly two years titled A Week of 12 Months. While I will speak more broadly about the project in time, this piece marks its starting point.
Untitled (Red) was created between late 2024 and early 2025, during a period when I was refining my understanding of my practice and its central concerns. At the core of this work is my belief that Blackness, particularly in the American South, exists in a state of surreal tension. It is both a social construct and a lived reality, and the space between those conditions produces a landscape shaped by contradiction, imbalance, and irrationality.
At an earlier stage, the project was more directly focused on the language of the Bible and the ways it has been used to justify harm. Having grown up in the church, with family members deeply committed to it, this subject carries a personal weight. My approach is not to reject that foundation outright, but to critically examine how religious language and imagery have been appropriated and distorted, often in service of systems of oppression such as slavery and Jim Crow.
In this work, the figures appear as Klansmen, and they are understood as such. However, the source imagery is drawn from an engraving depicting Spanish Holy Week processions. When this imagery is placed within the context of the American South, its meaning shifts. The cloth, originally tied to ritual, devotion, and penance, becomes recontextualized through the history of racial terror. This transformation speaks to how visual language is not fixed, but shaped by context, history, and use, and how symbols can be carried across time and repurposed toward entirely different ends.
The deep red ground intensifies this tension. It suggests blood in multiple forms: the blood of those harmed by racial violence, the symbolic blood of Christ, and the deep red of sacramental wine. These references sit in conflict with one another, holding violence, faith, sacrifice, and ritual in the same space. The color becomes a site of convergence where devotion and brutality are not easily separated. It reinforces the emotional weight of the work while pointing to the ways belief and violence have historically been intertwined.
Untitled (Red) marks a turning point in the development of A Week of Twelve Months, where personal history, critical inquiry, and visual language begin to converge into the direction the project now takes.
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