"Distemporal Deliverance of a Sentence"

This installation consists of a 10' x 12' room with white walls, with an open doorway leading into it. Ideally, the room is constructed with at least two outside walls as well, also painted white. On these outside walls, teasing viewers into the room, is a line of fingerprints. This line pulls viewers from afar into the room, where they meet a large work consisting of thousands and thousands of fingerprints on the walls. The work is a consistent five feet in height, beginning two feet above the floor, so that the fingerprints along the middle of the walls make up a solid but variegated band all around the room, except for the doorway.

As I created this piece, I thought about those wielders of authority who have "taken" the fingerprints of us all. Our prints are inserted into documentation that paradoxically marks our individuality at the same time that it claims our connections to and commonality with others. I want the stunning repetitiveness of this piece to suggest the taking back of a single fingerprint, mine, but also the taking back of all fingerprints. By decontextualizing this marker of identity, I hope viewers will see it anew, attaching fresh new meanings of their own to the image and notion of something so simple, yet profound, as a fingerprint.

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