I try to tell a story when I'm playing. I try to make an emotional connection when I'm playing versus before I played just to play. Now there's a sense of purpose of why I play, of how I play. So people can actually feel what I'm saying to them.

What I preserved in the figures [at Invisible Man] are those white eyes and white teeth, because that's still connected to the way in which blackness, in the extreme, has been stigmatized and the way it was often joked that you couldn't see black people in the dark until they had their eyes open or were smiling.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

It's forcing the issue of perception by rendering an image that is just at the edge of perception, which in someway forces you to look more closely and for you to adjust your vision so you can see in the dark.

I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.

I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.

Artwork operates on two different levels: On one level there's artwork as a mode of expressivity, and then there's the other side, where the image is a construction that is meant to engage in a discursive field in order to preform a particular function.