ENTRY 2023
Oil, acrylic, conte crayon, clay and glue on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Early turnstiles were used to allow human beings to pass while keeping livestock inside their pens. Today, they are commonly used for business and security purposes. They give accurate, verifiable counts of attendance or passage. By controlling the direction and passage of one person at a time, they are useful to surveillance operations.
Turnstiles are a mundane reality of urban life, most commonly in transit spaces, public pools and playgrounds, and entertainment venues. But they are also sites of political and social strife across carceral and civilian contexts. They separate civilian populations and serve as checkpoints to enforce legal and illegal occupations.
In these paintings, the turnstiles are negative spaces, atmospheric vacancies, dissolved structures—a kind of wishful thinking. The fields left behind or waiting ahead are bleakly physical—endless cracked earth. In Entry, flames burn as beacons or in memoriam, suspended between here and there. In Revolution I and II, items of what should be innocent childhood are caught between the bars, in a revolving machinery that is oblivious to both the oppressor and the oppressed.
