My work included in this year’s PRIZM art fair are new works on paper from my Bundlehouse series. Reflecting on this year’s title Noir, Noir: Meditations on African Cinema and Its Influence On Visual Art, I first thought of the fact that I began Bundlehouse in 2005 to raise awareness of the plight of Africans on the continent who are displaced and suffer the lasting legacy of slavery and European colonialism. I think of the research conducted during the early years of Bundlehouse and the many hours I spent viewing documentaries on colonialism in Africa, vintage African music videos, photographs, and African films including the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s work. In practice, I was gathering fragments of an African past, to think about the present and future.  

I think of Ousmane Sembène’s making use of a used 16mm camera, leftover film stock sent by friends from Europe and Sembene’s recruitment of everyday people (friends and family) to make Borom Sarret (The Wagon Driver), which is considered the first African movie made by a black African. Like Sembène’s 16mm camera, most of my materials have been previously used. My Bundlehouses, whether 2D or 3D, are constructed using materials and objects that have had a previous function or purpose. The practice of utilizing dispirit fragments to create an image can be found in Sembène’s early films and is fundamental to Bundlehouse.