“The Race 2”, 2024 – plastic prison inmate bags, glass, cloth, tape, photocopy prints and steel – 60 x 48 x 13 in.
When someone gets locked up it takes something from them, and from the ones around them that you never quite get back, the prison industrial complex is something that’s touched my life in ways I won’t share, but I probably couldn’t name one person at least of color that I know who’s life it hasn’t touched in some way

This work is a double sided assemblage of inmate property inventory bags, in short, the bags they put your possessions in when they lock you up.

On the front in each bag there is a section of a photograph of Tay K, posted at the beginning of his 55 year sentence started at about 16 years old, along with a piece of a shredded shirt and a handful of shattered glass, a part of this comes from the Gil Scott heron song “pieces of a man”. The shredded shirt and glass alludes to the idea of a person coming to pieces, as they get chewed up and dispersed within the system. and in order to fully reclaim your self all of these bags must be unpacked, and even then all the pieces can never be fully reassembled, at least not in the way they were before, but there lies the potential for something new, and even beautiful to emerge.