REP-HAIR-ATION

REP-HAIR-ATION

handset letterpress metal and wood type, etching, reduction linoleum cut, dollar bill, gocco, felt, handmade abaca and cotton paper, photo engravings, polymer, collagraph, and human hair

Edition size 14

16" x 21" (box), 15" x 20" (sheet)

2007

REP-HAIR-ATION is a portfolio of 15 prints utilizing a wide range of printing and image-making techniques that examine the legacy of slavery in the United States. Throughout the portfolio, the words SEE, FEEL, OPEN, and ACT are explored metaphorically and literally, through text and image, in a meditation on institutional racism that continues today in the form of the prison-industrial complex.

This project was inspired and greatly influenced by Abolition Democracy, a collection of interviews with Angela Davis, in which she discusses the persistence in the United States of historical systems of oppression like slavery and lynching and how they are perpetuated today by the prison-industrial complex. She challenges us to confront the human-rights catastrophe in our jails and prisons by acknowledging that the contemporary practice of super-incarceration is closer to new-age slavery than to any recognizable system of “criminal justice.”