PAINTING STRANGE CANVASES WITH BILLIE (2022)
PAINTING STRANGE CANVASES WITH BILLIE
Painting Strange Canvases with Billie is an experimental film and performance work created during a residency in New Orleans that investigates the boundaries between painting, movement, and embodiment. Drawing inspiration from Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, the piece explores the body as both image-maker and image, challenging conventional understandings of painting as a static medium.
Through the application of paint to the body and its movement across the canvas, the work transforms the act of painting into a performative gesture. The resulting marks become evidence of motion, time, and physical presence, blurring distinctions between performance, dance, film, and visual art. Rather than treating the canvas as a passive surface, Painting Strange Canvases with Billie positions it as a site of interaction between body, memory, and material.
The work is also concerned with the instability of language and classification. By questioning what constitutes a painting, it challenges rigid definitions of artistic mediums and the systems that sustain them. In doing so, the piece asks how meaning is constructed, who has the authority to define it, and what possibilities emerge when those definitions are disrupted.
Created in New Orleans, a city connected to my family's migration history, Painting Strange Canvases with Billie reflects broader themes present throughout my practice: ancestry, transformation, and the reimagining of inherited narratives. Through film and performance, the work proposes painting not as a fixed object but as a living act—one capable of holding movement, contradiction, and change.