Critical Essays
On Artist Labor, Refual, and the Question of Sustainability
This essay explores the need for a sustainable art practices grounded in time, care, and refusal.
- Published April 27, 2026
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A sustainable art practice requires the same recognition. It requires awareness to notice when something is pushed into unsustainability and to determine how to respond." |
Almost Free: The Limits of Liberation and Speculative Imagination in Sinners
A critical essay examining the constraints of speculative freedom within narratives that claim liberation while reproducing containment.
- Published June 7, 2025
"Sinners" is a visually lush, ambitious genre-bending film that blends vampire mythology, Southern Black history, and speculative fiction. Its world is rich with texture, metaphor, easter eggs, and love for Black life. "Sinners" tries to ask what it means to be free, but it waits until the very end to do so. That ambiguity could've been a gift, an opening for viewers to sit with the weight of unresolvable questions. But its promise to speculate freedom through the supernatural is undercut by narrative choices that flatten women, over-explain its own metaphors, and restrict the radical potential of its form. By the time this question of freedom arises, it feels like a loose thread rather than a guiding force. What could have been a truly transformative meditation on Black agency, survival, and liberation becomes a more conventional story about which men are heroes and why."