2026
Archival pigment print on Moab Entrada Rag Bright paper
8×10 (image size); 8.5×11 (print size)
Open edition
Signed on verso

The Weight of Freedom (after Charles Ethan Porter) considers the watermelon as a material object before it became fixex as an anti-Black symbol. The work draws together Charles Ethan Porter’s Untitled (Cracked Watermelon); my appropriation of it, Garden with fruit (after Charles Ethan Porter); and the story of Isreal Campbell, who used watermelons to resist the labor demands of slavery and eventually chared the tactic with others in the same predicament. The discarded rinds point toward use, consumption, and the ordinary material conditions from which political meanings emerge.