Targeting For a Safer America

This series is an inquiry riding the line between human/subhuman, inside/outside, and what is quotidian/sacred. Homo sacer (Latin for "the sacred man" or "the accursed man") is a figure of Roman law: a person who is banned and may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed in a religious ritual. By applying fresh flowers (gendered biomasses) to shooting targets (racialized biomasses) purchased from Law Enforcement Targets (letargets.com), the subjects in this series grapple with the possibility of using gender to deconstruct race. What is the range of possibility for the flattened and generic “Arab/Muslims” whose image used to provide consumers necropower—the power over life and death—as a commodity? To map an iconography of iconoclasms I placed cut flowers on these shooting targets, and photographed them, to see if they might grow beyond symbols of dominion over human beings. How does one get outside of an already-othered existence? What does an escape beyond the state of exception look like other than martyrdom?