Trent
Harlan
Bozeman

I struggle to understand my level of association with death, specifically Black death. To chronicle that involvement throughout my life would be painstakingly tedious. Death has been an unwoven thread in the social fabric of the American experience, but in years leading up to the pandemic and throughout, the harm of black bodies has taken up space within all social spheres. It is within the political advertisement playing on your local radio station. It is concealed within the census data that nobody tends to examine. And, of course, it is presented during primetime television programming. Black children and young adults now exist at a time when the visual and auditory reminders of their inferiority are on full display. You, too, can witness violence against black bodies at the click of a button. Whether or not someone chooses to see these reminders does not suggest the validity of their occurrence. When I was younger, news media did not showcase Black death as they do today, most likely due to cameras not being as prevalent. However, we all know these displays of violence that garner much attention are repeat offenses that have occurred many times before.

When Black bodies gather within their own spaces, this public or private enclosure we create for ourselves directly opposes the powers that be. Recognizing and actively considering American history, my history is an uphill dilemma that does not guarantee any resolution or clarity but provides an opportunity. Steve Biko states that we must “rewrite our own history and produce in it the heroes that formed the core of our resistance to the white invaders.” Through working in collage and photography, my art practice has adopted this attempt to revise my history by producing artwork that functions as visual propaganda resistance material to encourage the everyday acts of refusal that reflect the precarious state of Black life then and now. I may have accepted how subjugation and Black death permeate through the framework of how this country operates, but I refuse to enable this concept to flourish within my art.

Time is compressed and expanded by manipulating the image and the archive. Known and unknown legacies and objects are recontextualized against my experience working in the American South and returning to an academic institution. Building a revised history that speaks to a precarious state and recognizes the emotional and physical labor that is intertwined with Black life, I attempt to visualize the continuing conundrum of Black death and its manifestations.