Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea and Memories (23 Mins)
Premiered at The 59th International La Biennale di Venezia (2022) in the Grenada National Pavilion Palimpsest: Tales Spun From Sea And Memories explores fragments of Ottobah Cugoano’s life, who was a major figure in the abolitionist movement in England towards the end of the18th century. He was kidnapped in Ghana and brought to Grenada as a slave before he was brought to England as the personal servant of Alexander Cambell, a Scottish Plantain owner in Grenada. His book Thoughts And Sentiments On The Evils of Slavery... played a seminal role in the abolitionist movement. He was one of the first Afro-Britons to have written a book in English, while employed as a servant for the Royalist Artist, Richard Cosway, introduced to all the pageantries, of class, race, and power in 18th Century England. Cugoano life ended in obscurity.
“Rich and vibrant in visuals as it is compelling in its several narratives.”
—Kaitlin Anne Veroort, Art Spiel
Second Eulogy: Mind The Gap (40 Mins)
Second Eulogy: Mind The Gap (premiered at the Venice Biennale 2019 Grenada National Pavilion) exploring personal and collective memories of colonialism, exile, queerness, and identity in Grenada. The film spurns personal tales of loss, longings, memories, and phantasmagoria by interweaving fiction and non-fiction to conjure an abstract story of interconnected lives. The central tale narrates the lives of Nelson, a fisherman and father; his Gay son James coming of age in a verdantly charged landscape; Antoinette, Nelson’s wife who embodies the island’s colonial past and Mother Country; and their maid, Josephine.
“For his incredible film 2nd Eulogy (Mind the Gap)—you must watch all 40 minutes!—in the Grenada Pavilion, the New York-based artist Billy Gerard Frank had difficulty finding gay actors in his Grenada homeland, so he turned to the app Grindr. The lead actor in the film is terrific. “
—Sarah Douglas, Editor-In-Chief , Art News
Absence Of Love (20 Mins) Narrative
Absence of Love is an intimate and taut portrait of three lives: James and Michael, on the far side of a once passionate romance, and James and Samuel, estranged brothers, coming to terms with their father's death, a Baptist minister in the deep south. The film plays with time: the present, in which the story follows these characters as they form a complex love triangle; the past, through the window of childhood memory; and the love story, out of time and place. A richly textured film, Absence of Love viscerally captures the deep-rooted alienation of gay youth in the African American experience.
Daddy’s Little Boy: Letters in Fragments
Early experimental work exploring male incarceration in America.
Projects in Development
Poetics of Errantry
“We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”
—Édouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation
