the messengers 2021

Media: ink, watercolor, tempera, felt-tipped marker, and correction fluid, scanned and exported to HD Video on a LED monitor in a wooden box.

The Messengers (2021, 01:00 min) is a video drawing text performance animation of pronouncements streaming out of Celestina Simon’s mouth, Haiti’s black Joan of Arc. The video drawings are made up of 100 plus small images and text on paper, using hand-painted stop motion animation to tell my story. They are created by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. I continue this process methodically, giving each change to the image a second to two seconds of screen time. A single drawing is altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. I repeat this process sometimes hundreds of times per canvas. These palimpsest-like drawings are exhibited along with the video drawing as finished pieces of art.