Final weekend to visit Tangled Up in Blue, Gina Lee Robbins’ installation in response to fatal encounters with law enforcement in Cook County for 22 years.

From the artist’s statement: When I got the news of 13 year-old Adam Toledo’s murder in Chicago last March, it went through me like an arrow. In the photo that circulated all over the news and social media, I saw in his contagious smile the 10- and 11-year-olds that I’ve gotten to know as a teaching artist, and the many soccer teammates and classmates my sons have had over the years. I saw a child.

I wanted to understand how it is that interactions with law enforcement can have such lethal results. I discovered a citizen-run organization that has been collecting media reports of any encounter with law enforcement that resulted in a fatality for over 20 years. These include instances when an officer has used deadly force, when an officer has used less than deadly force, when a person has been fatally struck in a vehicular pursuit, or when an individual has taken their own life, among other cases. I looked closely at the data for Cook County, Illinois and was struck by the volume of cases, by how many stories and names I recognized, and by how many I had never heard before.

Encounters is the result of my journey through this data. I read every reported story of a life lost in the presence of law enforcement between the dates January 1, 2000 and April 30, 2021 in Cook County. As I read each story, I rolled a small wad of porcelain clay in my hands. When I finished I said the deceased’s name aloud, and made a fist, squeezing the clay in my palm. I repeated this process for all 624 individuals whose stories were reported.

Before firing the porcelain, I rubbed cobalt carbonate into my hands and loosely touched these forms, leaving random remnants of blue on their surfaces after firing. I strung them together with steel wire, by year.

Relics is my exploration of what might have been left behind following some of these instances, I collected 13 items that were significant to the stories reported: a box cutter, fork, pellet gun, spent firecrackers, cardboard sign, beach ball, knife, automobile debris, pizza box, dust mop, screwdriver, stroller wheel and sleeping bag. I shrouded each element individually, using cotton sheets and burlap that I had hand-dyed and torn. I then bound them with yarn and military thread in various shades of blue, working reclaimed 9mm bullet casings into those whose stories involved the use of deadly force.

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Tags: dickson project space, Gina Lee Robbins, Tangled Up in Blue, Waubonsee Community College