GOODW.Y.N.

PROJECT STATEMENT

When I performed “Ghost of Myself and You” at the first Veterans’ Arts triennial event, I was not sure as to how the audience of onlookers would react to my work. This is because much of my work centers around creating a bridge between myself and the “other”—especially the oppositional forces that were in Iraq during my deployment in 2003. I do this simply because I felt that the Iraqis position in MENA was a reflection of my Blackness in America, downtrodden, unwanted, and left behind.

These feelings that I housed way back when I was in service never left me. I became haunted by the memories and images of families eating, sleeping, and surviving in bombed-out apartment buildings, streets and children caked in litter, dust and dirt, cars whose metal frames were collapsed inward like stepped on Hot Wheels toys. These images haunt me a great deal more now than the smell of gunpowder and smoke in the air; I suppose because the threat of violence was on occasion in comparison to the everyday witnessing of Iraq men, women and children being resilient in the face of despair.

The preparation of my work for “Ghost of Myself and You: The Sandpits” centers around my once buried emotions as a veteran, mother, and American citizen—a titled I once wholeheartedly rebuked; it will be an installation/body-performance piece, a living monument to those in the Middle Eastern countries that lost their lives, and their families that continue to be resilient in times of strife. It is also a dedication to the undying testament of veterans like me, who are artists that use their work to tell the whole story—not just propaganda, who choose to live and fight this society that is covered in the blood of these and other peoples, and not be silent about its atrocities. These individuals are my band of brothers and sisters, as are the Iraqis artists, truth-tellers, and soul searchers.

The DEMIL Art Fund will help me create a “grand opus” dedicated to both these groups in the middle of Times Square. It will be a large collaboration, using many bodies and multiple hands to coordinate and collaborate to create my vision of an urban sandpit. The funding of my work is both an astonishment, and a catalyst to expand my work farther than before, within the realms of collaboration, spiritual recognition, and most of all the search for solace.