Dawn Of… (genesis)
Installation / Sculpture
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Dawn Of… (genesis) sits at the center of Three Tries: The Beginning, functioning as both anchor and origin. It stages consciousness as something spatial and navigable, approaching the formation of the psyche through material, memory, and environment.

Constructed from the artist’s childhood bed, salvaged steel, rocks, satin, queer literature, and a blurred image of the church sanctuary of their youth, the installation layers fragments of a past that persists. Referencing Freud’s iceberg, it holds the visible and submerged in the same space.

At its center, the bed becomes a sculptural self-portrait of the artist’s adolescent body, reclining nude. The work maintains a deliberate vulnerability, mirroring lived experience while opening space for reflection. A constructed St. Andrew’s cross and draped fabric invoke crucifixion and burial, linking religious ritual, transformation, and the artist’s upbringing within a Southern Baptist context. The bed rests on rocks and partially concealed texts, surrounded by memory, desire, and inherited belief, where pleasure remains present but constrained.

Within Three Tries: The Beginning, the work operates inside a structure that parallels the Stations of the Cross and Freud’s psychosexual stages. These systems map development through sequences of control, repression, and transformation. This piece aligns with the id, the foundational structure of the psyche, holding instinct, impulse, and primary need prior to regulation.

From this origin point, the surrounding works unfold as manifestations of these stages, tracing cycles of repetition, rupture, and reconstruction. Dawn Of… (genesis) brings together desire, religious conditioning, and memory, placing the viewer within the artist’s inner world while inviting reflection on their own.

Photography by Getsay.