Hank Willis Thomas, Strike, 2018

Hank Willis Thomas: My name is Hank Willis Thomas.

The piece that I have in this exhibition is called Strike. It is depicting an arm with a police baton attempting to strike another arm, which is holding that arm by the wrist. It's mirror-polished stainless steel, so the viewer can see themself reflected in the work, and can also see different aspects of the background in almost a fun house mirror way. 

While this work is inspired by a work from nearly a century ago, it could also just as easily be inspired by any number of photographs that have been taken over the past seventy or eighty years in various contexts, in various parts of the world. That's part of what I find to be powerful about it.

The cropping had been something I'd been doing for a while where I was inspired by Roland Barthes notion of the punctum, the thing that pierces you when you look at a photograph, the thing that sticks with you. I have been making sculptures for over a decade of the punctum of different photographs so that I as a viewer could get it almost like a phenomenological experience with what was previously a two-dimensional image. 

To make the sculpture, we did a 3-D scan of two models and had them hold a position and then scan them in three-dimensional space, which is basically making a three-dimensional photograph and then had that cast and molded into a sculpture. That process of building it almost, I was definitely really interested in what would be the most iconic silhouette.