BC: What type of work do you create, and why? 

SV: After reading cultural critic Mark Dery’s essay “Black to the Future,” the type of work I create is a strain of Afrofuturism in that I re-imagine the history of the African Diaspora through the lens of science fiction, complex characters and spiritual realms. I’m invested in re-documenting the life and interpretation of African Americans through my own black and white vernacular that’s at once deeply personal and extremely invented. From juxtaposing historical images with family photos, to creating dark, alternative imaginative spaces and figures through my installations and Xerox drawings, my mark-making, patterns and aesthetic is in many ways otherworldly, an alternative universe. I write in my artist statement that the installations are “fear, anxiety and memory translated on flapping sheets. Ghosts congeal and bodies form in dark corners and hang about whispering until the inflection of their voices can be heard among the living.”