These portraits are created on the back side of beautiful tiles; they ask us to turn around and look back at ourselves from a different point of view.
We live inside a relentless current of information, one news cycle breaking over the next before we have finished witnessing the last. We are always marching forward. How often do we take the time to look back? When we look in a mirror, we see only the front — it is easy to forget that everything has a back side, including ourselves, including our history.
The unglazed backs of these tiles bear geometric patterns — small, repeating forms, like brickwork. Brick by brick is how walls are built, how institutions are built, how the structures of government accumulate weight and permanence over time. I am drawing these portraits on that surface: human faces on the back side of the architecture of the state.
The subjects are US citizens killed by agents of the United States government: police officers and ICE agents, the machinery of the state. Pen on tile is permanent — marks that will outlast paper, outlast the brief window in which these names were spoken on the news, outlast the imperative to move on. Grief does not move on so easily. Justice, if it comes at all, arrives late — these portraits hold that space, the space between the loss and the reckoning that has not yet come.
I am not moving on. I am giving myself — and the viewer — time to turn around. To practice hindsight. To reflect on what we have witnessed, what we allowed ourselves to forget, and what it means to have kept walking.
The title holds two truths: the State of US — the nation and its laws — and the state of us, the people inside it, the witnesses. I am reflecting on this quiet devastation with my hands, one face at a time, on the backside of the beauty of America.