Untitled (Crime Map) 2010, drawing, 18" x 24"

Untitled (Crime Map), 2010, detail, 18" x 24"

Untitled (rape, homicide, aggravated assault), 2010, drawing, 18” x 24”

Untitled (rape, 7th avenue) 2010, drawing, 18” x 24”

Untitled (rape, homicide, aggravated assault), detail, 2010, drawing

Untitled (rape, 7th avenue) 2010, detail, 18” x 24”

Crime Map (digital study - Police Helicopter view) 2012

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From 2008-2011 I lived and worked in South Central Los Angeles. During this time, Mayor Villaraigosa mounted a media campaign to rebrand the area as 'South Los Angeles' in an effort to erase historical racial tensions. As an agent of gentrification, I found myself questioning my relationship to a community that I was simultaneously alienated from and drawn to. I became acutely aware of a sense of privilege that I had never known as a queer individual - skin privilege.

South Central has been stigmatized by its gang violence and crime, nothing to say of the locus of community and identity of 'blackness'. In an effort to think through my relationship to this complex community, I began a series of drawings based on LAPD's interactive crime map. Using compass and straightedge, I mapped my location to the closest and most violent crimes. Every Week, I transposed the online map into Sol Lewitt inspired formalist drawings, juxtaposing the privileged discourse of conceptual and minimalist art with contested social factors of economic disadvantage, racism, and the police state. During this time, I was also heavily influenced by Situationist conceptions of Space and the politics inherit within.

I left Los Angles in 2011 for New York and grad school, rendering the body of work incomplete. The next step would be to transpose the dots onto their physical locations. These dots then become public artifacts but also are designed to create a 1:1 map meant to be viewed from the NYPD Police Helicopter that regularly patrols the area.