How Many Billboards, MAK Center for Art and Architecture.
Courtesy of Ken Gonzales-Day and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

After looks to the history of portraiture, and specifically to the history of the portrait bust, as a case study from which to consider the impact of eighteenth century ideas about freedom, equality, capital, family, marriage, and even the location of the soul, which laid the groundwork for other more repressive legacies, like racism, capitalism, imperialism - Ideas which continue to influence our ability to communicate and transcend our differences. After is about the legacies of the Enlightenment Project and asks, what, if anything, comes after race; after ideologies and their aesthetic manifestations have run their course. It is about the history of photography in shaping our understanding of the "real," in the digital age. It asks what comes after authorship, after language, after appropriation, and looks towards the future with all its unknowns intact - if unsettled.

After borrows from Jeremy Bentham's 1787 text, The Panopticon; or the Inspection-House: Containing the Idea of a New Principle of Construction Applicable to Any Sort of Establishment, in which Persons of Any Description Are to be Kept Under Inspection..., made famous by Michel Foucault's analysis. Bentham believed that to be seen was to be controlled, and even since Foucault's canonical text, a myriad of new forms of surveillance have emerged which exceed even Bentham's wildest imaginings. Today, surveillance can be found in every major institution throughout the world but surveillance can extend far beyond the reaches of the human eye and with every click of the keyboard, actions are recorded, infrastructures are maintained, driving infractions can be issued remotely from cameras at intersections, desires are identified, and so much more.

In the museum, objects influence their surroundings, they direct temperature, light levels, humidity, insurance values, staffing, and even the salaries of those who care for them. Sensors guide, limit, and direct human behavior, laws restrict and limit ownership, image use, and in the museums, even the lights can accentuate and direct the viewer's gaze. Signage tells visitors what to look for, where to park, where to check over-sized bags, where to shop, eat, use restrooms, put on audio headsets, take off audio headsets, and what to look for in a work of art. Bentham would praise this new museum as an "Inspection House" of the highest order. Foucault characterized museums as culture machines. After begins at this very point. They are portraits of portraits, and tell us something of the world from which they came. Transported across time and space, these sculptures are silent reminders of persons once loved, or reviled, but remain as indecipherable as the most ancient of hieroglyphs to the thousands who pass them daily with hardly a glance. They are portraits, but they are portraits made of stone, bronze, and plaster. Strangely, much like the first photographs, these sculptures have become objects of wonder, but these metaphorical “inmates,” may long to roam free once more.