Examining the present-day structures of our national bureaucracies, and the way they perpetuate this legacy of oppression, Ben Durham’s Chain-link Fence Portrait (John) portrays one of the artist’s adolescent acquaintances whose mugshot ended up in the public domain. The subject’s likeness is executed in undulations of handwritten text on handmade paper, and the entire composition is systematically contorted by an underlay of chain-link fence. Durham describes the person he once knew with a series of associative memories, his words the only delineating line. “I strive to find some way to tell the subject’s story and yet I know I will fail to do so,” says Durham. “Whiteness in painting and drawing is not neutral or a blank slate but always for me an absence, a record of what we can or cannot see. This balance and the question of who deserves visibility and attention and what attentions are valued and facilitated by our culture is at the center of my ongoing inquiry into memory, representation, and the criminal justice system.”