6th grade was a really stressful year. Among other things, my classmates shoved me in lockers, because I was small. The stress that year caused my Alopecia areata (AA) to flare up. AA is an autoimmune disease in which hair is lost, usually from the scalp due to the body’s failure to recognize “self” and destroys its own tissue as if it were an invader. My hair began to fall out, and my peers made fun of me. They brought patches and glue to class. In Bad Selection (Alopecia), 2015, I appropriate images from barbershop charts. Placing them onto a blue backdrop in Photoshop,
I crudely select fields of the face to delete. The resulting image is graphically arresting as the sky blue seems to emerge through the distorted face. The lightness of the colors and the floating nature of the head suggest a negated body consumed by blue. Each portrait is a broken person, violently disfigured against the backdrop of innocent and youthful blue. The subjects are black men who look around my age, 25-30. In 6th grade I began to learn about the dynamics of educational institutions—where I did or did not fit in them, based on my defects.
