I’ve begun making full scale pieces of Keep the Top Eye Open. One, “Body/Target” originally was going to be just a reproduction of a gun target. But when I looked up “paper gun targets” I was astounded that most of them were black silhouettes with white scoring lines. Proportionally, very few of those for sale are white paper with black concentric lines.
I wanted to take the idea of a shooting target and transform it into a panel that I could use in the part of the installation that expressed the torture methods used by enslavers to break black bodies and minds. So I maintained the basic trope of full frontal with hands in fists by the side but redrew the image. I also built the padded figure out of roughly sewn sections, since one of the most elided aspects of American enslavement was the continual and casual fracturing of enslaved families - and hence individuals.
William Still, son of a fugitive mother and head of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee returned his diaries of escaped slaves to burial in a nearby cemetery every night. Even though his own life, the life of other enablers, and the lives of escaped slaves would be in jeopardy if the diaries were found, he kept them because he knew that his diaries might be the only way family members could later find each other. Every escaped slave took an alias upon leaving his or her forced labor camp. So anyone coming after would not be able to discover where a father, husband, sister, mother, had gone if no one kept a record of their original name; where the fugitive came from; who had been their enslaver; where they were headed; and what they would now be called. After the Civil War William Still published his diaries in hopes that freed men and women might be able to find some of their relatives.
The second panel, “The Past of this American Present: I” is self-explanatory.