July 4, 2023
I am working on a zine! It will take a while to come to fruition though. I also saw a TikTok pretty recently about how some zines are actually just magazines, so maybe I will call this a "publication" or something. I don't want this to be too bougie or pretentious though, so we're still TBD on what kind of "thing" this is. Working title is "The Freedom Zine" and maybe even "How to 'Get FREE' Definitive Guide" - but like I said: TBD.
I don't want to show too much off right now but I am excited about it. Right now I'm just fleshing things out and finding ways to articulate my thoughts. Next steps are collecting inspo, storyboarding, fleshing out my writing a bit more and then finding funding to get the actual booklets printed.
June 2, 2023
I don't know how I feel about being an artist lately - at least not in the ways that I have been in the past. I've been dealing with a fair amount of rejection lately and it has taken a lot out of me. I even decided to quit altogether and posted it to my Instagram. Although I can recognize that I was being really dramatic at the time, there's something in me that just wants to take a big long break from trying to stay active and working in the arts in the ways that I feel I have to.
All this is to say that the next activity I'm setting my sights (or scents) on is perfume-making. I've been looking for a signature scent for a while and realized that I just want to smell like my favourite wines. My current go-to is a mixture between the Malin + Goetz "dark rum" scent and Saje's "refresh energizing mist" - which both don't last as long on the body as I'd like them to. This led me to thinking about a line of scents called "skin contact" that smell fruity, last long on the skin and most importantly - are sexy.
More on this when I figure out how to become a perfumer/scent artist.
"In His Image"
“In His Image” is an ongoing visual exploration of my relationship with grief. I chose one iconic image of my father as the basis for this iteration of the project. I recreated the photo, originally taken circa 1975, and created a digital art piece with the photos of my father and I.
After my father’s passing, I was able to feel connected to him through photos taken throughout his life. I revisited pictures that I had taken of him and re-edited them. I have a special relationship to images of him because it wasn’t until after he passed that I was able to capture much of his stoicism and wisdom in images I’d taken years ago. His friends sent me photos from their youth that I had never seen before, and I was moved by the striking resemblance between my father and I.
This project is called “In His Image” because of the way that memory animates images. He is alive in many elsewheres, one of which is in these images.
hello, hello, hello!
Welcome to the "in progress" section of my website.
I have a lot of fun ideas that are sort of there, that I'm working on or that I just want to put somewhere.
I will try my best to update this whenever I remember, but I would like this space to be experimental - so we will see how long this even lasts.
If you see anything here that piques your interest, shoot me an email at ayo.tsalithaba@gmail.com and we can chat about it!