Art of Ken Gonzales-Day, ‘Shadowlands,’ on display at DPU’s Peeler Art Center

Monday, November 27, 2017

“Shadowlands,” an exhibit of the work of Ken Gonzales-Day, a California-based interdisciplinary artist, is on display at DePauw University’s Richard E. Peeler Art Center through Dec. 15.

The public is invited to attend the exhibition, which is presented free of admission charge.

Gonzalez-Day supplements his photographs with research and writing that engage critically with history, art history and Western conventions of race, blending historical tragedies with current events. Using photography and video, he explores trauma and resistance as experienced and embodied by racially oppressed populations in the U.S.

The exhibit will be a concise survey of the artist’s career, including works from the Erased Lynching, Searching for California Hang Trees and Run Up series. His most recent work draws parallels between historical lynchings and high-profile cases of police brutality affecting communities of color today. The core of the Run Up series is a cinematic restaging of the 1920 lynching of Charles Valento.

Utilizing details drawn from the coroner’s report and his own archival research, Gonzales-Day chose to focus on this particular event in order to draw attention to the police presence at the scene that tacitly condoned the extralegal violence.

By presenting historical occurrences in conjunction with contemporary events, Gonzales-Day collapses the historical distance and exposes the reality of racialized violence in the United States. Exploring the dichotomy between presence and absence, Gonzales-Day draws attention to the selective vision of American history and the perception of people of color as expendable. He combines scholarly research and a photo-journalistic sensibility with rich aesthetics to create jarringly haunting portraits of historical trauma present in both the people and the land of the United States.

Minnesota Public Radio noted the exhibit’s examination of the “troubling connections to racially motivated violence today,” while the Minneapolis Star Tribune pointed out that his works “critically engage with our current moment.” Meanwhile, Photograph magazine cited the timeliness of Gonzales-Day’s exploration of racialized violence in America, saying the exhibit “deftly compresses history and raises questions about our historic construction of race.”

The galleries at the Peeler Art Center are open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.; Saturday 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.; and Sunday 1- 5 p.m.

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