PHOKUS

ARTIST BIO:

Phokus is an interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between drawing, sculpture, sound, and installation and curating. Rooted in post-Black and Afrofuturist thought, his practice engages memory, material, and ritual as portals toward reclamation and transformation. Phokus creates spaces where the seen and unseen coexist—where presence, ancestry, and imagination converge.

His expansive, Interdisciplinary practice moves fluidly across drawing, sculpture, sound, installation, curating and performance. Anchored in themes of memory, erasure, and reclamation, his work draws from the deep well of African American history, ancestral knowledge, and Southern cultural inheritance. Through a symbolic, process-driven language, Phokus explores the liminal spaces between visibility and obscurity, silence and sound, loss and transcendence.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I am the Shaman, an artist. I stand upon the shoulders of giants descending from an affluent notable lineage that prompt me to create. Sages. Griots. Merchants. Draftsman. Mediums. Colonialism has imposed a new form of truth. Histories have been cannibalized. I reclaim and archive human narratives. Shamanism predates religion. It is a common practice found across races, cultures, and nations. My work explores  parallels of these residual evidences in juxtaposition to a modern black culture’s changing definition of self in this American arena. I reclaim and establish new narratives by introducing rites of passage through symbols and my own personal landscapes. By gathering objects and anecdotes I reanimate and reclaim histories, creating new narratives through the work.