From Joel Williams, 2019

Family photo album, 12” x 12” x 3”

From Joel Williams is a fabrication of my black family history that uses my father’s absence of a father as the point of departure. To expand on this missing part of my lineage, I used internet-sourced bios, census records, obituaries, and photographs to construct a narrative of my family history. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s, Silencing the Past, the work seeks to provoke inquiry into the powers behind history-making and the archive that determine what is fact and fiction in the grand narrative of the West. By emphasizing the relationship between image and caption and utilizing the common aspects of family photo albums, I blur the lines between truths; creating an experience that is just as believable as it is unbelievable.