Amy Elkins exchanged letters with prisoners on death row, and she interspersed those letters with images created in an effort to capture the interior landscapes evoked in these correspondences: imagined seascapes; re-creations of items described by prisoners; a prison lunch tray purchased on eBay. She created color portraits of inmates by pixelating and obscuring their faces according to the amount of time each individual has been locked away. As viewers, we are invited to puzzle over an assortment of clues, including reenactments, exhibits submitted for our considerations, partial evidence, and statements both leading and misleading. The work is elegiac and provocative, asking the viewer to engage above and beyond a simple, cursory viewing of these images. (from Aperture Portfolio Prize announcement, 2014). In her statement, Elkins writes: 

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. The men I wrote with spent an average of 22-1/2 hours a day in solitary cells roughly 6’x9’; not only facing their own mortality, but doing so in total isolation. I wondered how that would impact one’s notion of reality, of self-identity or of their memories outside 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? Above: Nine Years out of a Death Row Sentence (Forest). © Amy Elkins

Between 2009 and 2014 we would write and share stories regarding our very different day-to-day lives. I constructed images using formulas specific to each of their described memories, 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 sentences. Stripped of personal context and placed in solitary cells, their sense of identity, memory and time couldn’t help but mutate. Additional tangible objects such as drawings, letters and envelopes are interspersed amongst the constructed landscapes and pixelated portraits, along with objects sought out or recreated out of descriptions given. Installation views. 

Of the seven men I originally wrote with: one was executed in 2009 and one was executed in 2012, both of which maintained their innocence throughout their sentences.  Three eventually opted to move on from the project.  One was released in 2010 at the age of 30, after spending 15 years in prison.  One was released in 2015 from a life sentence that had been given to him at the age of 16.  He had served twenty-two years in an adult super max prison, seventeen of which were spent in solitary confinement. Left: Letter excerpt from a 44-year-old man, 17 years into his death row sentence.

Amy Elkins appears at the Cress Gallery as Spring Diane Marek Visiting Artist in conjunction with her Cress Exhibition Black is the Day, Black is the Night. Artist's Lecture: Tuesday, February 9, 5:30 pm, followed by an opening reception for the exhibition.

Cress Gallery of Art, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 752 Vine Street, Chatanooga, TN Info

Amy Elkins (b. 1979 Venice, CA) is a photographer currently based in the Greater Los Angeles area. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Elkins has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally, including at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Austria; the Center for Creative Photography, Tuscon, AZ; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; North Carolina Museum of Art; Light Work Gallery, Syracuse, NY, Aperture Gallery and Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC; the DeSoto Gallery in Los Angeles; and the Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, among others.  Elkins has been awarded with the Lightwork Artist-In–Residence, Syracuse, NY (2011), the Villa Waldberta International Artist- in-Residence, Munich, Germany (2012), the Aperture Prize and the Latitude Artist-in-Residence (2014), and the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2015). Elkins also engages an active free-lance and commission practice as a photographer and recently finished a photo project on artist Ed Ruscha for the Financial Times Weekend Magazine. Elkins is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC.