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.

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

An imagined countryside landscape in shades of brown, depicting a river scene with a windmill, boats, people, and animals

Before the emergence of landscape as its own subject in Europe during the late sixteenth century, medieval and Renaissance artists crafted fantastical landscape backdrops for biblical and mythological subjects. Though artists in the seventeenth century, particularly in the Netherlands, increasingly studied the natural world and recorded existing views of their surrounding environs, painters and draftsmen often reordered, refashioned, or completely transformed observed elements, creating picturesque scenes that were conceived rather than experienced. This Focus on the Peck Collection installation presents three seventeenth-century drawings whose topographical specificity, atmospheric realism, and pictorial plausibility make it difficult to distinguish reality from imagination.

Located on the second floor, Ackland Upstairs is a dynamic space, with art changing every eight weeks during the academic year. The Ackland staff collaborates with UNC-Chapel Hill faculty to create installations that support their courses, drawing from the thousands of artworks stored in the Museum’s vaults. As a result, there is always something new on view Upstairs, and always a new context in which to consider it. For faculty and students, Ackland Upstairs is an extension of their classroom. For all Ackland visitors, it offers a glimpse into the courses taught on campus and a window into the Museum’s extensive holdings.

pARC is designed as an open-ended spatial gesture that comes to life when people engage with it. The spatial intervention serves as an extension of the conversations, activities, teaching, and programming offered inside the Ackland. The Urban Conga designed pARC to inspire a variety of ways to play; from constructive play to fantasy play, the installation is a transformative communal platform for all users to engage with the space, the Museum, and the University in new ways.

The interactive installation is made up of a series of archways that mimic the archway of the Ackland’s front door. These interconnected arcs appear to grow up from the ground and frame a variety of social spaces that allow people to put their own identities onto the work, the Museum, and the surrounding space. Each of these archways frames or reflects its surroundings, allowing users to look at the area through a different lens. As they pass by the work, they begin to notice that their movement changes the colors of the panels, which spark different filtered views of what is around them.

The installation responds both to the user and to the environment, reflecting and refracting the surrounding context through its colorful dichroic lenses while casting shadows onto the ground and the panels themselves. During the day, as the sun passes over, visitors can see their shadows thrown onto the framed panels creating a shadow play interaction that makes people literally part of the work itself. At night this same effect is created through the use of red, green, and blue lights that allow people to mix the colors of their shadows behind the panels. At each end of the installation sits a platform that serves as a social seating space but also a stage for people to perform shadow plays on the work.

pARC becomes a flexible communal space evoking endless ways to play, gather, perform, teach, converse, or even take a nap. The spatial gesture takes on the identity of the user and utilizes its playable design to break down social barriers and spark communal connection within the space.