Venus Undone examines Black femininity, desire, and the construction of self through the lens of the Venus ideal. 

These works unpack inherited images of Venus as an invention of European mythology, male imagination, and enduring archetypes from American chattel slavery - systems of beauty, perfection, and repressed desire that have long defined and distorted physical and cultural conceptions of Black femininity. I am interested in what happens when this body, historically objectified and mythologized, begins to speak for herself. 

Exploring the tension between what is seen and what is felt, the figures I create move fluidly between form and dissolution as unbounded beings that resist fixation. Their bodies expand, merge, blur, or fragment, evoking both ruin and rebirth through the tactility of oil paint. Intimately scaled environments invite a closer viewing experience. These gestures ask: what is a goddess when she is imperfect, undone, or intended for a different kind of gaze?  

My own Venus is neither muse nor myth, but a complex, sentient presence. She embodies the contradictions of desire and violence, beauty and erasure, objectification and self-possession. In these conjured moments where the “othered” woman exists in relation to herself, the image becomes an encounter, and the act of looking calls for more than visual pleasure.