Precious Metal
This series depicts the grill as an extension of the body—an appendage that carries identity, protection, and performance simultaneously. Raised in the American South, my relationship to the gold grill is not observational; it is lived. I wore a grill as a teenager in the early 2000s, where it functioned as a marker of cultural alignment. It was never neutral decoration. It was armor and ceremony.
The grill operates as a highly coded object—holding associations of pride, bravado, and status. It transforms the mouth into a site of self-expression, where the internal self is projected outward.
I’ve treated the grill as an appending structure—no longer fixed to the body, but behaving like an organism in its own right. It expands, ruptures, sharpens, and mutates. What was once an innocuous ornament begins to act and express the psychology of its host.
Artwork Details
Precious Metal No. 1 - 6, 2011
Polished Brass and Plaster
Approx. 5 x 5 x 5in. | 13 x 13 x 13 cm
*These sculptures were made from the castings of my bottom teeth and my friend Jamell Watson's top teeth.