Defense Date
2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Sculpture + Extended Media
First Advisor
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Second Advisor
Corin Hewitt
Third Advisor
Michael Jones Mckean
Fourth Advisor
Massa Lemu
Fifth Advisor
Kendall Buster
Abstract
his collection of prose and poetry operates alongside my sculptural practice, using language to investigate what material alone cannot fully hold: the emotional residue of desire, intimacy, repression, and bodily exposure. Through writing, I examine how microgestures, fleeting acts such as glancing, withholding, pulling, or hesitating, become sites where queer desire, surveillance, masculinity, and vulnerability are negotiated within the body. Grounded in lived experience as a brown queer subject, the work considers how power structures regulate visibility, intimacy, and erotic expression, tracing the ways these pressures accumulate within both language and form. The collection moves between prose, poetry, and sculpture as interconnected modes of translation. While the poems document intimate and unresolved personal experiences, the prose establishes a conceptual framework through which these fragments can expand into material form. The sculptures emerge not as illustrations of emotion, but as afterimages of accumulated microgestures, where instinctual bodily negotiations become externalized through scale, texture, tension, and excess. Across the work, softness and violence, concealment and exposure, tenderness and self-protection remain in constant oscillation. Together, the project asks what happens when emotions that are typically fleeting, illegible, or socially disciplined are forced to occupy space, duration, and material presence.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-7-2026
Included in
Architectural History and Criticism Commons, Art Practice Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Philosophy Commons, Poetry Commons, Sculpture Commons