With herself as her subject, T.J. Dedeaux-Norris (Guam, 1979) uses painting, video, photography, music, performance, and installation to explore the internal drives and external influences that shape identity. She came to art through music, which informs her practice. In addition to making her own music videos, full of tongue-in-cheek hip-hop posturing and songs about her identity as an artist and an African-American woman, she samples and mixes materials liberally in her other works. These range from paintings on patterned bed sheets of her New Orleans neighborhood destroyed by Hurricane Katrina to photographs of herself enacting black stereotypes to visceral performances centered upon the act of licking. In her work, as in life, Dedeaux-Norris constantly re-invents herself, claiming: “Just as the city of New Orleans and places on the Gulf Coast struggle with progress and change, so do I as a person.”
