Transcript: A Seattle artist cuts through the chaos of a pandemic

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(Light music)

 

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When COVID hit, I was just like rocking it.

 

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I had people in here, every week in here, cutting and we were just on this crazy schedule.

 

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Then boom, velocity stopped.

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It was like the train hitting the wall.

 

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And all of a sudden it was just me.

 

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And then with the upheaval that we've been through

 

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sparked by George Floyd,

 

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but obviously so many things leading up to that.

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And all of a sudden there's this tinder wood that just goes up like a flame.

 

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Something's wrong with the culture.

 

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So our children are suffering as a result of it.

 

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When COVID hit, the whole world stepped off the conveyor belt.

 

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I've really limited my contact to one, two people in my working.

 

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I was working today on

 

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my series for the Geography of Innocence; that's for

 

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the Seattle Art Museum show that's gonna open in November.

 

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We're hoping.

 

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The Geography of Innocence show came up almost a year and a half ago.

 

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It's all about geography and how we read things,

 

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how we arrive and what you read when you see a face.

 

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And what are the things that you bring to reading

 

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that map of the face that are embedded in the culture.

 

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About the geography, how far do you wanna travel?

 

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You know, how much do you wanna know?

 

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So when you look, you're framing it,

 

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according to the cultural sort of precepts that go with that.

 

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You know, the brown face. You know, the child.

 

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It's really interesting, trying to make children

 

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look like children, it's kinda hard.

 

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The difference between, an older face and a young face sometimes it's just a line,

 

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it's just a cut, it's just the shape of the mouth.

 

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And so if you get that a little bit off,

 

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you add five years or you add 10 years.

 

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Young brown children get disciplined, you know,

 

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Sort of in many different settings, and it's because we often imbue them

 

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with knowledge about what — that they know what they're doing,

 

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that they've got some sort of ulterior motive.

 

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So the paper cutting and through the reveal, you know,

 

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the reveal that you've seen in my cutting,

 

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it's also kind of a metaphor.

 

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And so that reveal is what builds up the body of the figure.

 

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And there is kind of an illumination that comes through this open, vulnerable, loving.

 

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It's just what you see.

 

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Being by myself has not been some new torment.

 

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What has been torment is that I can't control any of it, you know?

 

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I'm the first generation in my family born outside of the South.

 

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My family moved to the Northwest in the ’40s because of the war.

 

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They were sharecropping farmworkers before they got here.

 

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I am the sum total result of all of that dreaming, all of that effort.

 

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The upheaval that we've been through.

 

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We can't go back, and so how do we incorporate

 

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this experience into the life, the life we have?

 

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We can make something out of what we have left

 

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for those of us who will come after this moment.

 

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We've been given a chance maybe to do some things differently.