Date of Award

Spring 5-31-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Painting

First Advisor

Yasi Alipour

Second Advisor

Jackie Gendel

Third Advisor

Angela Dufresne

Abstract

My artistic practice explores the intersections of impermanence, enclothed cognition, necropolitics, and rest as intertwined acts of decolonial resistance. Through a studio practice rooted in transient mediums—charcoal, chalk, and erasure—the work confronts neoliberal and anti-Black demands for coherence, productivity, and permanence. The ephemeral drawings, layered and dissolved on my studio walls, embody a fugitive aesthetic inspired by Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity[1],” rejecting colonial logics of legibility and commodification. These impermanent gestures mirror Haiti’s silenced revolutionary history[2], as theorized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, while invoking Vodou’s vevè symbols as counter-archives of survival.

Enclothed cognition[3] is reimagined through spectral figures draped in colonial uniforms and plantation garb, rendered in chalk to dissolve respectability politics. The garments, echoing Frantz Fanon’s racial epidermal schema[4], become sites of hauntology—ghosts of colonial violence exorcised through the medium’s fragility.

Drawing on Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance[5] and Christina Sharpe’s in the Wake: On Blackness and Being[6], the work reclaims rest as a racial justice praxis. Photographs of erased drawings become altars to stillness, echoing Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat[7] and Kevin Everod Quashie’s Sovereignty of Quiet[8]. By centering impermanence and rest, this practice proposes a Black feminist liberatory horizon—one where to pause is to defy necropolitics, to erase is to remember, and to create is to breathe. The project culminates in Sylvia Wynter’s call to re-enchant humanism[9], offering a decolonial grammar where art becomes ceremony, and rest, a portal to collective healing.

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