REWIND

During the course of the year, Paul Rucker will create 1-3 new robes a week.

Excessive Use is a series of works on paper created with a Glock 22 semi automatic pistol. Paper pieces in Excessive Use are named by the city and date of the event.

Art can tell stories. For years I would talk about injustice by reciting numbers and statistics. When you say, “We have over 2.3 million people in prison,” it’s too large of a number to comprehend. During a residency around prison issues at the Blue Mountain Center in New York, I found some maps that I felt could help tell the story. This project shows the proliferation of the US prison system from a celestial point of view. Using different colors to indicate different eras, the viewer can clearly see the astonishing growth of this system over time.

Soundless Series is a group of wood sculptures resembling cello bodies, and marked with the date and location of that unfortunate demise.

Based on Shelter in the Time of Storm, a hymn my mother knows from her experience as a church organist.

Stories from the Trees re-imagines vintage postcards of lynchings through animation and new musical composition. This project brings to life different scenarios of lynchings—events where communities, including women and children, gathered to proudly watch these atrocities. The images draw from postcards that were commonly made from photographs of lynchings. PART 1 Unknown lynching victim with children surrounding the body.

Deprived of an adequate diet, slave children were very small by modern standards. Slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth due to chronic undernourishment. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth. In addition, slave children received harsh punishments, not dissimilar from those meted out to adults.

This installation utilizes the image of a widely sold target that has been drastically modified to create the likeness of a hooded individual carrying Skittles and watermelon juice cocktail. The image is rendered in the form of a throw blanket, typically used for comfort and warmth.

Each of the throw blankets in the stack depicts the image of a lynching or killing. They capture experiences of extreme human atrocity in objects designed for comfort, warmth, and safety.

Historic objects that are referenced in the show Rewind