How does one describe the life that oscillates among the categories of domestic, whore, slave, and corpse?
     Creating bodies of work from a black studies perspective, I use mediums such as photography, performance, video, and installation to present viewers with moments that feel like steps out of time to ponder fugitivity and waywardness. In my performance practice, I mediate between abstract plays, interpretive movement-based works, and recitations of original and pre-existing texts to describe a life that is domestic, whore, slave, and corpse. I have grown to rely on failure and experimentation to incentivise looking backwards as a means of renegotiating past understandings in one’s life and artistic practice. With this process, I challenge the idea of knowledge being able to only be held within documents and essays, using the language of the academic elite. My interest lies in how performance art, when used as a process-based tool, can help evolve experiences that reconnect people to severed lines of thinking not found in an institution, but at landmarks of public communal exchange and internalization.

     JaLeel received their BFA in Photography & Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art.