Home & Garden, Decor, Children, Accessories, Handbags, Arts & Crafts
Women Owned
My name is Lewis Derogene, first name pronounced as Louise and I’m known under the moniker, PhenomenaLewis. I am a multimedia artist born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti based between both Connecticut and New York. I graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2019 with my BFA in Fine Arts. My mediums range from photography, performance art, drawing, sculpture, and installation art, but the latter of them stem from my poetry which will later turn into preparatory sketches before evolving into their final form. I’m greatly inspired by Dutch painter Rembrandt in which I used his style of extreme contrast exaggerating my lights and shadows to isolate and bring focus to my subject matter(s). I label myself as Afro Cogitatio, afro being the root and descendent of Africa and cogitatio being the latin word for my thoughts, meditations, or reflections. This terminology is also my guide towards better understanding my ideas, myself, and the reasoning behind both my ideas and myself; how they correlate and how I can express them to reflect the individual (myself) and a collective (a group of people that I relate to or vice versa). There’s a beauty and ugliness to learning more about your mental health as a Black person anywhere around the world. It involves breaking down systemic barriers that contribute to your mental health deteriorating and learning how to take the steps towards healing. A lot of those learning and unlearning steps revolve around the influences of spirituality, politics, sociology and other factors. I try to use these influences subtly in my artwork, but what I try to convey or capture in the single moment of bliss through my self portrait photographs that can appear so sublime even though underneath there is a layer of pain and suffering. It’s a cover which a lot of us use and go through to not fully expose our suffering to the world, and make it seem that we are strong enough to carry on with our daily lives. We tend to hide our pain and suffering with things that normally make us extremely happy, but it’s only a percentage of it while the rest: our depression, anxiety, or any negative thoughts does not allow these “things” to make us completely happy. They’re the barriers that we try to push and eliminate by ignoring them. Overtime, I’ve struggled to know what my focus was within my art practice and realized that no matter how I word it, whether it’s the “state of being human,” to the “understanding of the self,” it all has to do with mental health or just the mind. Being a Haitian (labeled Black in America) woman, I want to base my artwork on the experience of that mental health in the Black community, mainly all Black women and I mean all. I want to inspire conversations to go deeper than the surface area of asking a Black person how they’re doing, how they’re feeling and actually start to uncover layers of trauma, of silence, of pain that they can’t uncover themselves to help them towards healing. To put on a facade of being okay dampens those layers causing them to meld over into one confusing story that when asked again, how they’re doing, will not be able to answer because they won’t know for sure. Within my new discovered journey of identifying my art practice better, I find it better to start with myself hence my self portrait series, but I plan to and already started to implement others and their stories.