Culture / Art Republik

Black is the Day, Black is the Night

Amy Elkins’s exploration of isolation

May 05, 2014 | By Staff Writer

Amy Elkins’s series Black is the Day, Black is the Night is a “conceptual exploration into the many facets of human identity using notions of time, accumulation, memory and distance through personal correspondence with men serving life and death row sentences in some of the most maximum security prisons in the U.S., all of which had served between 13-26 years at point of contact.” 

Elkins wondered how the men faced questions about their own mortality, often in total isolation. She says on her website “I often wondered how that would impact one’s notion of reality, of self-identity or even of their own memories outside of such an environment? Did they embrace the mind of a dreamer, the mind of a thinker or succumb to their bleak environment and allow mental, physical and emotional collapse? Did their violent impulses land them in an infinite state of vulnerability?”

Throughout the project, Elkins kept in touch with the prisoners in isolation, leading to a form of collaboration between artist and subject. “I constructed images using formulas specific to each of their stories, age and years incarcerated. Through these formulas their portraits became more unrecognizable and their memories became more muddled, regurgitated and fictional with the endless passing years of their sentence. Stripped of personal context and placed in solitary cells, their sense of identity, memory and time couldn’t help but mutate. I sent these images to them, they would critique them. This went on for years.” 

80f377e1d75fa2d5 Return To Sender

Pageimage 525927 4952837 Elkins Amy 05

71eb59ef482e8bae 10 Elkins 13of32a

Df62e801dd2aee14 07 Elkins 15of30 A

6df02534e13d3ef4 04 Elkins 14of38a Da3b30a156f40b71 Elkins Ppac 009copy

Da23fe4d69d48b7a 13 Elkins 15of32a

1ef89508254381cf 27 Elkins Foodtray

D21cd88853170b04 Robert Landofthelost

Be46fb0a1566ae7d 19 Elkins 14skys

A05990cd02ed92be 16 Elkins 19of32

3703548b622cf63b Elkins Bitdbitncopy

90ef0899dc7af5f6 25 Elkins Openingletter

Pageimage 525927 4979454 053 Concrete Cornercopy 1

Find out more at Amy Elkins’s website here!


 
Back to top