My Work from Both a Personal and Critical Context

     My work exists at the intersection of biblical allegory and collective histories, examining the tension between survival and transcendence through the lens of the Black diaspora. As a Haitian American artist raised in Brooklyn and now based in Los Angeles, I am deeply influenced by my spiritual beliefs, familial relationships, and cultural heritage. These personal foundations inform a practice rooted in painting, sculpture, and assemblage.

     Critically, my art questions historical narratives and interrogates the colonial residue embedded in spiritual and political systems. Through pieces like "A Stiff Necked People" and "Transformation of the Meek Hearted", I use wood, bronze, and found materials to engage with ancient mythologies and diasporic trauma. I’m drawn to the "skeuomorphic glitch"—a material and conceptual strategy where traditional and digital, organic and manufactured, sacred and profane, all coexist. My figures often resist fixed interpretation, morphing between objecthood and subjecthood. They are part of a larger project of reclaiming and re-encoding spiritual power within Black bodies, crafting a visual language of endurance and hope that speaks to both past oppression and future liberation.

-Emmanuel L. Desir