Based on the poem “ Sadie and Maud” by Gwendolyn Brooks, this piece is the meeting of the two siblings. Maud chooses the straight and narrow of going to college, getting a job, and living a socially “respectable” life that ultimately leaves her alone in the end. Sadie, “the livliest chit” extracted everything life had to offer. Having babies out of wedlock, being outspoken, donning the burden of being the family’s pariah, she may have died young but she died with a life of little regret. Though I am most definitely Maud, I see myself in both. Ive walked the path that I am “supposed to” and it has led me to a depths of loniness that has left me speechless. I also lead a life of a black sheep and am trying my best to scrape life with my very own own fine tooth comb. Through photo, film, ans installation, this is the process of meeting myself in many forms.
Boi Like Me is an multidisciplinary excerpt from my ongoing film “ Sermon for a Watermelon Seed.” This exhibition centers my experience working through my relationship to my body and gesture in regards to transitioning and my adolescent preceptions of what it means to be a “man” through the lens of the girlhood that will never leave me.