Rowan Renee, No Spirit For Me, 2019

Artist Rowan Renee’s installation No Spirit For Me. 

Artist Statement:

In 2018, I acquired the contents of my father’s criminal case file from the Florida State Attorney who prosecuted him. The file included the official records used to condemn my father—court records, witness statements, and police evidence photographs. Through these documents, I was able to track how the justice process failed in a case that the State hailed as an example of justice served.

Using lithography, weaving, and metalwork, I re-presented over 1000 pages of these records as “hanging files” in a fictitious police evidence room. The repetitive motions of printing 1000 pages through an etching press, of tracing the shapes of redaction on the loom, of welding dozens of steel joints was a method to use my body—the site of violence—as a vehicle for justice.