I’m a synesthetic interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. In my work, I manipulate colors, visuals, and audio by painting music and documenting sonic emotions. I create art using my synesthesia, a phenomenon where two senses collide with each other. I have a type called chromesthesia, which allows me to see colors when I hear sounds.
During my process, I immerse myself in color, sound, and visuals through video, painting, digital, and audio production. My work explores themes of identity, culture, race, and psychology. I’m inspired by emotions from music, life experiences, nature, ciphers, film, and dance. My work helps me explore the migration of African music through the African diaspora as it influences expression in Black culture and beyond. Growing up neurodivergent in a Haitian household, I had challenges expressing my emotions and became interested in how other people feel and think. My introspective process includes sound layering, creating colorful templates, and rendering my internal state of being to canvas or digital format for viewers to engage with.
My work lives at the intersection of time and emotion, and movement is a big part of my practice. I’m very tactile with my work by touching, seeing, hearing, and feeling. I start my process by cutting and gluing sounds together digitally. When I enter a deep synesthetic flow state while playing back music, I see washes of color and shapes. Translating what I see to canvas, I then create a backwash of color to depict the overall mood of the sound piece. I layer the backwash with symbols, such as circles and lines, to represent different instruments whose color is determined by the pitch of the sound. I create new media using video editing and tech languages to illustrate movement.
My goal as an artist is to help people see beauty in the complexity of life experiences and other people. I hope others can view their own emotions as color maps that can be used for expression, investigation, and healing.
Sleepyfoot? is New York City-based interdisciplinary artist Manon Casimir-Sainton. Her paintings mirror her synesthesia induced by personal multi-genre sound compositions and mental health experiences. She is self-taught and intersects her work from a background of art, education, and technology.
Sleepyfoot?’s work has been exhibited at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (CA), AnnMarie’s Sculpture Garden and Art Center (MD), and The Art Center at Highland Park (IL). She has shown locally at Site:Brooklyn, The Sheen Center, Calabar Gallery, and Plaxall Gallery. Sleepyfoot? has been commissioned by Columbia University as well as music and spirituality-based organizations in NYC.
