....the Rustbelt

What might the world gain from examining the transmission of culture as a lineage via the ritual of daily living in an environment that insulates its inhabitants from the rest of society? I have become fascinated by what it is that makes people feel they belong to a place, or a people, or a history, or a politics, or anything else they feel they belong to. Equally, I wondered what it was that made people feel the opposite. The occultist claims that it is a matter of resonation and vibration.

Growing up I have had the advantage of moving around and taking in every sight, sound, smell and taste. From the sunbelt cities of Central Texas to the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas & the Ranches of East Texas & the rural and depressed communities of the South rich in history, to the intense urban blocks of New York City’s Lower East Side, Bushwick, Hell’s Kitchen, East Harlem and Bronx neighborhoods…I have been privy to them all while being exposed to AME church services in the heart of New Jersey’s black communities to the ritualistic rites of the Eastern Orthodox, high mass of Anglican and Apostolic even Pre-Nicene Cathedrals & Puerto Rican Pentecostal Holiness storefronts. There is something to be said for being in Princeton in the afternoon for a meeting of a research group and in Newark later that night for a baby shower in Baxter Terrace. There is a perspective that is earned by the sensitive and aware…an intangible enlightenment that begs to be expounded upon in an anthropological dialogue. From the cathedral ceiling kitchen in a Montclair, New Jersey Tudor Mansion where a new family gathers for kippers and eggs, to the priceless moments of perceived exchanges of body language between two teenagers in a Passaic, New Jersey housing authority project hallway…there are layers to both situations that are commonly overlooked and ignored. There is beauty to be observed and documented in either realm, but submersion in the experience is key to understanding them both. I was always aware on some level that socially, culturally, politically and economically…life, individual cognitive domains and subcultures as experienced by the individual…is incredibly complex. While there are many a surgeon to perform a particular surgery and many a lawyer to arbitrate or argue a defense…there is in general a great void that is yet to be filled by thorough anthropologists who truly possess insight gained from experience and immersion as opposed to dry, lifeless theory and graphs of comparison.

I find that even my own artwork is anthropological in nature in that I attempt at capturing moments in the life of humans...often those underrepresented...occasionally dis-enfranchised groups that hold such rich cultural distinctions that hold to be evident in their body language, speech patterns, dress and approach/outlook on life in general.

I've photo documented urban communities of Caribbean Hispanics and to ensure polarity I continue to cover the Celtic mystic/religious element of fraternal orders that dominates Celtic Thought. I am enthralled with the relation between culture and thought. I know that my own is incredibly intense and thoroughly complicated. I also know that the urban landscape of the North Eastern United State's rust-belt is breeding ground for the most interesting and diverse sets of cognitive thought relative to how people view and interact with their environment.

Indigenous cognitive categories that fascinate me are the urban Hispanic enclaves of the tri-state regions who have fostered a cultural mix of hip-hop and US pop culture intertwined with a distinct blend of afro-Caribbean and northeastern urban reality. Their preservation of and insistence on the existence of lodges and fraternal systems in their communities amidst the physical setting of high rise projects, brownstones, row-houses, tenements and bodegas flanked by the many factories and blighted industrial parks as well as the vacant lots of Newark and Passaic (scars left by the race riots of the 1970’s) are all apart of the collective subculture existing in the urban districts of New York and New Jersey that span hundreds of miles and numerous counties of interconnected urban sprawl and occasionally blight.