“Mangrove, Mud, Mystery (series)” performance action part #1a & #1b © 1999
...a more complete project documentation
"Jack Island" archival digital print @ 1992
Jack Island is one of my favorite places to visit in Florida. I've been visiting the island since 1976. It is probably the place that caught my fascination, and now devotion, to mangroves. I've seen so much on this island: various snakes, sea otters, vultures, ospreys, hawks, egrets, rabbits, various snails, and a variety of insects, most annoying are the mosquitoes. It is almost past the best time to visit. Summer is when it's mosquito infested.
The above image was part of my research for an installation with sound, at the Polk Museum, Lakeland, Florida, looking across the mangrove covered island from an observation tower.
“Untitled (heron)” archival pigment print © 2011
"Underwater Shrine (Greynolds Park)" 3 documentary photographs archival pigment prints (available as a set)
"Underwater Shrine (Dead River, Upper Minnesota)" documentary photograph archival pigment prints (available as a set)
The exploratory search for an "underwater shrine" included two different bodies of water, one the Florida intercoastal as it ebbs and flows in N. Miami Beach, the other a fresh water lake in northern Minnesota. In both cases the elusive throne has disappeared from view. Is it Mami Wata, or Olokun we are searching for?
The countless millions of enslaved Africans who were torn from their homeland and forcibly carried across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of this "trade" brought with them their beliefs, practices, and arts honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. Reestablished, revisualized, and revitalized in diaspora, Mami Wata emerged in new communities and under different guises, among them Lasiren, Yemanja, Santa Marta la Dominadora, and Oxum. African-based faiths continue to flourish in communities throughout the Americas, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. <via: Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas>
Photographs of Olokun Priests, Devotees and Shrines in Benin City, Nigeria Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas ...
"Water Abyss (the cleansing)" performative action archival digital print © 2005
Water Abyss is a performance that took place over several days involving a pilgrimage to an island covered with mangroves and ongoing prayers to their spirit, previously seen as a young female African dancer.
Performance Art: Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist. Performance art has origins in Futurism and Dada, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of Conceptual art. Right from the start performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which Performance reached a wide public. <via: Tate>
Shop
Flickr Portfolio
