Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland

Please note: the gallery featuring this work will be closed to the public from November 13-17, 2024.

In Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland, monumental square grids of multi-colored numbers dominate the exhibition space like giant sudoku puzzles. To create them, artist Sherrill Roland reclaims United States Federal and State Correctional Identification Numbers and repurposes them through what he considers to be a systematized portraiture making technique. The grids on view act as logic exercises that scramble and rework the former correctional IDs of the artist and his father. The resulting wall drawings create theoretical portraits of the two subjects. The shared system employed to create the two works emphasizes the various bonds shared by these family members at the same time that the formal qualities of the drawings evoke lone figures bound by cells.

Sherrill Roland is an interdisciplinary artist who deals with ideas of innocence, identity, and community. For over three years, Roland worked through the American criminal justice system (including his arrest, trials, and imprisonment) to establish his innocence against a crime for which he was later exonerated. As vehicles for both self-reflection and emotional release, his works explore the social and political implications behind the structures and codes of the criminal justice system.

Born in 1984 in Asheville, North Carolina, Sherrill Roland studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018) and earned his MFA and BFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2017 and 2009). Roland is the recipient of the Gibbes Museum of Art’s 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art (2023); a Creative Capital Award (2021); the South Arts Southern Grand Prize & State Fellowship (2020); and was an Art for Justice Grantee (2020).

While Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland is on view at the Ackland Art Museum, a related exhibition, Processing Systems: Numbers by Sherrill Roland will be on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from September 14, 2024, through January 12, 2025. Visit the Nasher Museum to see more numerical portraits by Sherrill Roland that are informed by Durham County exonerees.

This installation and related programming have been made possible by the generous support of Dorothy L. Heninger.

Please note: the gallery featuring this work will be closed to the public from November 13-17, 2024.

Listen to Sherrill Roland talk about his work in this interview on WCHL.

Image credit:
Processing Systems: Bonding by Sherrill Roland. Photograph by Alex Maness Photography.