The reference of the paintings comes from my upbringing playing little league and the necessary discipline sports provided to a son of a single mom. Whether it was the coach or the additional parents around that acted as a rooted and vital pedagogy of becoming and discipline. I am interested in these extra curricular yet necessary spaces to experiment, to learn and most importantly to live. The title stems from the realities of looking at the opposing team and feeling the butterflies fly up to your throat. I moved my whole life and in a way, assimilation of schools and sports have always been this opposing force, hoping you can create a safe space for yourself and your growth. I was nicknamed Homerun Hall and baseball served as a catalyst of proving yourself and your internal strengths. The negative space acts and oscillates around abstraction and subliminality. Suggestions of figures and forms that help articulate the mindscapes of these young men. When you grow up alone you strive for a family, for a relationship, for a trust and my little league team was the first recognition of the chosen family and the dedication you make by putting on that uniform. Baseball is America's game and in a way I am the away team. Confronting and challenging the status quo. The Black coffee suggests exhaustion and exploitation while entrenching the conceptual realities of the middle passage, trade and addiction. The white cotton canvas acts as a refusal and a conceptual play on whiteness. By entangling these ideas I start to form a language of my own haunting hybridity and the space between the absolutes of Black and white.