Benched Painting

Spray paint stencils, like most street art, are confrontational in nature and hard to look away from; and thus, the subject matter must be equally unflinching. I grab elements from pop culture, own photography, magazine collages, layer them in Photoshop, print them, and hand-cut them until my wrist gets sore. The act of hand-cutting is both meditative and progressive: the more cuts I perform, the more precise they become. Through the alias Rywando Jones, I explore social commentaries, in particular the stigma of mental health especially as it pertains to African-American communities, which merits discussion based on recent racial tensions in the country. To examine Black mental health is to examine the effect of events in both the past and present, how patterns of suffering repeat themselves, and the burden of certain societal expectations. It is an oft-spoken ideology in lower-income communities that the only paths to success for young black men involve athletics. I wanted to capture the feeling of despair and disappointment if that path never panned out.