EXHIBITION STATEMENT

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(def.) to censor or obscure (part of a text) for legal or security purposes.

We live in a 24-7-365 world of surveillance where our desires, our secrets, and our crimes can be photographed, bought, sold and traded in the digital market.  We can choose to hum along: “Every move you make, I’ll be watching you” OR We can choose to resist.  My personal way of dealing with the destructive dogey “Project 2025” is to MAKE MORE ART. 

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We have learned so much from many brave whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg to Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and ARTISTS from Jenny Holzer to Dana Claxton that the erasure of our stories by the powerful / the invisibilizing of our histories / and the silencing of our struggles from killing journalists to imprisonment / deportation are the common tools of authoritarian oppression, used equally by the spies and armies of our schools, governments and multi-national corporations.

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The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
~ Milan Kundera

Lawyer Jack Smith, who has served in the US Dept of Justice as an assistant and acting U.S. attorney, and head of the department's Public Integrity Section, created this legal brief.  Smith was also the chief prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, an international tribunal at The Hague tasked with investigating and prosecuting war crimes in the Kosovo War. 

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DC District Court judge Tanya Chutkan was the presiding justice over the criminal trial of then-former U.S. president Donald Trump over his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, including the events leading up to the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The case never went to trial and was put on ice after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, with the SCOTUS decision of immunity.

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Judge Tanya Chutkan released a redacted version of lawyer Jack Smith’s legal brief, here scanned and printed as photographic canvases, laying the foundation for this new body of work.  Printed on water color matte rag paper with archival pigments, these submerged and disappearing documents have then been further redacted with color field printing and water color painting and drawing.

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This work is dedicated to all the names in bold and to YOU.
– Pia Yona Massie

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