Manifesting Paradise

Manifesting Paradise, a project started amongst protests and a pandemic in mid-2020, explores the desire to know that there is progress and beauty in the future. Past work looks at origin stories and dissects history, but this project looks to the future and is an exploration of the endurance, permanence, and resonance of symbols, imagery, ideas, and omens through generations.

The project is inspired by tarot cards, using the familiar framework to approach ideas of divination and manifesting the world you want to see. More than just stating our existence (I am a man) or that we matter (Black Lives Matter), and similar in sentiment to Sun Ra’s “We are in the Future”, Manifesting Paradise ventures into unknown futures to decipher the messages that we need to hear in the present.

Fear of the unknown fueled mysticism tropes that made their way into Western folklore and pop culture fronted by enigmatic black women: Marie Laveaux’s voodoo in New Orleans, Miss Cleo’s Psychic Readers Network, or Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends. For me, this series is born of an interest that’s personal and generational. The re-popularized mystical realm — crystals, psychics, tarot, herbalism, astrology etc. — provide facades of certainty. Having come of age in a thriving economy and entering the workforce amongst its demise, my generation’s search for omens is related to a mistrust in institutions that destabilized futures we were promised and that in many cases never had our well-being or future interests in mind. The pandemic which has amplified economic and social struggles that were never fully solved, has likewise reinvigorated a need for messages from the future.

While this work is born from current conversations, and the goal is to look towards the future, the idea of covert meanings and hidden messages is a tradition that survived and evolved through the middle passage and cultural genocide. Like old negro spirituals that carried messages across plantations or rice and seeds braided into women’s hair as they were trafficked into enslavement, this project seeks remnants of a past to carry them into the future.

As I continue the series to complete the full 78 tarot images, I confront my own resistance to future telling. The common questions persist: Do you just see what you want to see? Does a prediction of the future temporarily placate your fears and anxiety in the face of deep pain and struggle? However, this project embraces the value in imagining futures for yourself, your family, and your community. If what you cannot see, you cannot be — then imagining the future can widen the scope of what is to come.

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