What Death Can't Touch | 2017

digital prints, 30x40 in.

What Death Can’t Touch is a series of digital prints that depict redacted images of toppled statues. For years I have collected jpgs of statues that were destroyed due to political, age or weather related causes. Last year I used this archive to make What Death Can’t Touch (2017). The process of making the prints actually informs the work itself. I first rescale the small jpegs through a process that prints the jpg at a smaller scale, then scans that print in a much higher resolution. This preserves the original pixelated quality of the internet image, but will produce a sharper print. After making the digital print of the image, I then create the redaction, that will cover the statue in a rudimentary way. To print the redaction I run the paper through the printer again, printing over the existing image. The result is a redacted image with a level of transparency that allows the viewer to still partially see the original underneath. The process also references the physical censorship of the actual physically destroyed statue.