Ken Gonzales-Day was born in 1964 in Santa Clara (USA). In 1995 he was awarded a Master in Fine Arts by the University of California at Irvine, he also has a Master in Art History from Hunter College. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
His projects take into consideration the history of photography, the construction of race and the limits of representation systems, ranging from photography of lynchings to museum exhibits.
‘Searching for California Hang Trees’ (Seeking the trees were people were hung in California) and “Erased Lynching” are two of the Gonzales-Day series that offer a critical look at the contradictory legacy of landscape photography and lynching in the American West.
Some images of the first series were selected to be exhibited at MDE11. Photographs taken over a period of 6 years in California (USA) as a result of a process of investigating the history of lynchings in that state, where the artist had the opportunity to discover more than 350 cases between 1850 and 1935.
It was a greater challenge to find a way to present the story that had not been told of these cases, says Ken, so he tried to decipher the workings of mobs and vigilante groups through newspapers and historical texts, with the aim of finding trees where people were hung at that time.
The pictures represent the actual trees, but also the many Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and Chinese who were lynched in California. For many, these images have come to symbolize a part of history that had gone unrecorded, had been denied or simply faded from the national memory of the United States.
By means of emphasizing the research into forgotten histories and photographic representation of documents, Ken Gonzales-Day seeks to transform the seemingly empty landscape into places of memory and resistance.
Website
www.kengonzalesday.com
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