Beyond Expectation Series, 2021, 36 x 20 inches

Beyond Expectations interrogates the intersection of racial discrimination and immigration through sculpture and photography. This series draws directly from my own experience navigating exploitative migrant labor systems. I constructed an abstract backdrop using a torn paper collage technique—layering brown paper with actual documents from my work and travel visa application. This surface holds the bureaucratic evidence of how immigrant labor is processed, tracked, and controlled.

The photographs position an ambiguous figure in fragmented interactions with everyday work tools—wheelbarrow, shovel, broom, mop—capturing the ways migrant bodies are reduced to extensions of labor. Still life images pair dismembered body parts with these tools, equating human value to utility and disposability.

The backdrop and images operate together and independently, blurring the line between object and subject, tool and body. By embedding my immigration paperwork into the work, I reclaim the narrative of a system designed to commodify labor while dehumanizing the worker.

Beyond Expectations exposes how Caribbean migrants chasing promises of opportunity are instead folded into a cycle of exploitation and racial bias. This series insists we confront how immigration systems replicate the same hierarchies and tools of control once used to traffic, categorize, and expend Black bodies.