This body of work—a mix of printmaking, paper weaving, 3D ceramic sculpture, and poetry—examines violences visited on Black people at the hands of the American state and attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.

From the gallery description:

In response to violent annotations and redactions made on Black lives by the police in all their forms, this work resists and refuses those terrors as captured in still images by employing “Black redaction and annotation.” Departing from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being: “Black redactions and annotations” reveal new ways of seeing the systems made visible in these images and the violences those systems enact. Further, this work examines the absurdity of what emerges from the wake when calls to redress systems that deliver anti-Black terror are met with empty, performative remedies. 

In Sharpe’s words, “Black redaction and…annotation are ways of imagining otherwise.” To that end, this work reshapes ways of seeing terror and timelessness captured in photos of anti-Black state violence. These experiments create disturbances, open wounds, and produce wakes in these representations of Black people in distress by cutting away at images, recomposing them, transforming them into new, abstract, dimensional objects, viewing them through the lens of critical texts, and treating those texts as both material and frame. This process poses questions about anti-Blackness, the optics of state violence and empty gestures to redress harm, temporality, and consciousness.

This body of work was on display in Seattle at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery in March 2022 and at Wa Na Wari from April - June 2022.

All photos by Juequian Fang.

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