No Spirit For Me: Evidence

(2019)

No Spirit For Me: Evidence is a series of photo-lithographs created from digital images of evidence seized from my father’s home. The objects – a computer, a camera, a packet of lube, a VHS tape – were depicted in scenes I recognized, overlaying my childhood memories with a forensic sense of anxiety. How did these images fit into the narrative that unfolded in the courtroom? What did they prove? What other secrets were lurking in the shadows of memory?

I first encountered the photographs on a disk mailed by the prosecuting attorney that convicted my father. I was immediately drawn to how the vernacular quality of the snapshots, originally taken by police detectives, contrasted with the severity of their purpose: to secure a conviction. In representing these images as artworks, I both wanted to hew closely to the original image, and to infuse them with my own power of authorship.

To do this, I used CMYK photo-lithography, a printmaking process not traditionally held under the photographic umbrella, where each color separation is burned onto a photosensitive plate, then individually inked with a roller and manually printed through a press. At each stage of the printing process, from digital file, to mixing ink, to paper selection, I could manipulate the image as well as its materiality. My use of lithography to create photographic prints is an intervention that distorts the image’s meaning through the labor of artistic production. Within the institutional archives where I source material, and within the larger field of documentary photography, these prints raise critical questions about the limits of photographic imagery as “proof” and the narratives that linger outside of the frame.

Interview

Lynne, Jessica. “Can Photographs Heal When the Carceral State Fails?”, Aperture, January 28, 2021.

Exhibition History

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, group exhibition, National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Cincinnati, OH. Curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood. April 22 – August 7, 2022.

Artist as Witness, group exhibition, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT. Curated by Julia Wintner. October 18, 2021 – February 1, 2022. (catalog)

Information: The Aperture Summer Open, group exhibition, Fotografiska, New York, NY. Curated by Brendan Embser, Farah Al Qasimi, Amanda Hajjar, Kristen Lubben and Paul Moakley.  September 23 – October 25, 2020.