TEMPORARY SERVICES INDEX

"Gang Proof Suit"

The development of this project was initiated through a series of conversations with a group of youth in the Back of the Yards community of south Chicago. We have directed our explorations to address and confine selected conditions (power, violence, poverty, abuse) situated within the young people’s lives as a primary subject of study. This project is not a singular reflection on a disorder nor is it a documentary of works cited simply through moderate descriptions and the images that stand in for them. It is a deliberate examination of that space in-between.  A space that requires study of what remains inescapable in the lives of unsuspecting youth who have limited opportunities to address that which is internalized. Our primary work is dialogical.

The creation of a gang-proof suit is a two-part investigation. To examine the initial phase [Research and Development], we explored six areas of inquiry identified within the Back of the Yards community that proved reasonable and relevant to what this project was intended to illuminate. Terms such as habit, hardware, hate crimes, harass, help, and home were determined as elements to both the space in which we chose to work and necessary ingredients to the eventual construction.

The ‘gang proof suit’ has secured the promise of dialogue that has been as elevating as it has been streamed with irony. Questions of mobility, safe passage, police protection, and the deadpan deliveries of murdered friends, brothers, and cousins marked and regularly intersected our conversations with a casualness and casualty of each event detailed. The drawings, sketches, photographs, found images, film stills, schematics, and data assisted us while we placed them strategically on the wall which became more consistent to the aesthetic of a strategic military maneuver than a critique.

- Jim Duignan