The Goddess Project is a large on-going work that encompasses various parts.
It encompass the Shrine of the Divine Negress Nr.1 as seen in this short video walk through at Dada Post Gallery in Berlin Germany.
The video also includes the early Goddess Constellation studies with acrylic on Gold-papers

The Shrine of the Divine Negress Nr.1 was created in such a manner so that the main transparent sections could easily travel and fold like a map.
The Dada Post Gallery space offered the possibility of hanging the panels on a custom stained "fachwerk" frame structure in parity with the former German fish-smoking factory.
It was bitterly cold at the time of the installation during one Berlin's coldest snow storms and i was often listening to Gregorian chanting in my studio. This meditative sound harkens back to my Roman-catholic childhood among nuns and monks both in Haiti and in the USAas well as my time spent as a enfant de choeur (altar boy).
Dada Post's other gallery space exhibited the work of African-american artist Paula Ross during the time frame of this installation. I was concerned about how intrusive chanting might be, though it fits perfectly with an aspect of my intent- in many of the rituals of voodoo's Loa (spirit gods) pantheon music plays a critical role.

For this phase of the Goddess Project entitled The Goddess Constellations i decided to portray the something rather abstract yet meaningful- the hour of death and transcendence.
This work marks a moment in time and space and is essentially a map of the sky above the city of Paris (see the extensive constellations diagram in this Diary posting).
Josephine Baker dies in hospital at 5am on the 12th of April 1975, a moment of destiny that in ancient astronomy would be as significant as the hour of birth.
Each star is impregnated with an image of Josephine Baker, as if to imply her transcendent return to the cosmos.

I am aware and welcome the abstract nature of the work, though i would argue that in a former time humans were extremely aware of the sky, the stars and awesome sense of the universal potential that lay within it.

The physical installation took me a bit less than a week in the gallery spaces of the NGBK in Berlin. Fortunately I had been well organized about as many aspects of this projects construction as possible. The velvet (the tone of the color, its edges, the transfer of some nearly 750 points), the support mechanisms for the fabric and each of the pins, the delineation into small / medium / large stars as perceived from the earth, the complex arguments to fabricate the tools needed to create each coin-like metal star.

This has turned out to be one of the most surprisingly photogenic projects. Surprising in the sense that a photo can easily collapse the visual spatiality we experience with the naked eye. During the opening it became a rather amusing and insightful exercise to have the visitors take self portraits with the oculus of stars. This seemingly magical experience reaffirms for me the mixture between myth and science that in part underpins the larger Goddess Project

In a recent show that included my work, there was a photograph by the afro-deutsch (afro-german) artist Philip Metz that caught my eye. A beautifully seductive photograph of himself in WHITE-face , across from a Talkberg (a mountain of talc-powder) used for the face and make up (reminiscent of the early pigment-mountains of the artist Anish Kapoor)

I am very interested in the works of artist that resemble each other and yet are completely different in intent and ultimately details.
I had created in 2000, while living and working in Paris, a project which i would call "The Hip Decadence of Seductive Glamour" as a response to my then environment of fashion-world overdose and the nagging details of its political deficits.
I collected many coins to use in a public coin-operated photo-booth located in the underground level of the "Opera" metro station in central Paris (9th Arrondisement). From my atelier at the Cité internationales des arts where i lived and worked, i started my transformation with blond wig, some fashionable digs and a good mixture of foundation make-up and rouge for the caucasian beauty market. It was all a bit absurd really, but it was an act of exasperation in my then environment. I arrived to the Fotobooth in the busyness of midday and inadvertently had left the coins at the studio and had to , in my new 'look', ask a variety of strangers for change. This was an unexpected action of sorts. Paris is an odd place where having such courage is respected and thus the photo documentation aspect of the work was able to happen. It seemed important to me at the time to create the documentation via this seemingly neutral machine in public space. The mere rock bottom paucity of it's capabilities in comparison to the dirth of highly paid fashion photographers the city of paris offers. This for me was a collaboration of sorts that would ultimately portray a rather complex cultural pathos played out with elements of race and cool.
The originals were sent to the Netherlands for a show organized by Simon Ferdinando at the time and i had them scanned and blown up to distance them from the scale of their source.