OUTBURST

OUTBURST

OUTBURST is a mixed media project exploring emotional suppression, masking, and survival within the Black queer experience. This project seeks to resist the expectation that marginalized people should neatly cope with humanhood.

Through imagery and narrative, OUTBURST examines what happens when emotion is continually compressed beneath the pressures of racism, misogynoir, queerness, poverty, gender dysphoria, and generational trauma. It explores the spaces where language often fails, documenting experiences that are deeply felt yet frequently overlooked, misunderstood, or unnamed.

While conversations surrounding mental health have become increasingly visible in mainstream culture, access, representation, and understanding remain uneven. Black queer communities are often forced to navigate mental health through systems that lack the language, cultural awareness, or intersectional understanding necessary to fully hold their breadth. OUTBURST responds to that absence by creating visual space for complexity, contradiction, grief, softness, rage, dissociation, and release.

Central to the project is the concept of masking - the performance of safety, normalcy, or acceptability as a means of survival. For Black individuals, masking can manifest through code-switching, emotional suppression, and conformity to racialized expectations. For queer individuals, it can appear through concealment, passing, or self-erasure. Where these experiences intersect, new emotional realities emerge. OUTBURST seeks to divulge the grey area and make those realities visible.

Rather than offering resolution, this project invites confrontation, recognition, and reflection. It asks what it means to survive within systems that demand silence, and what becomes possible when suppressed emotion is finally allowed to surface.