“The image painted across the surfaces of the slats is derived from a still of The Smithsonian Channel documentary film titled, The Lost Tapes: LA Riots (2021). This moment documents a demonstration of protestors in front of the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles on the night of 29 April 1992. At the scene a multigenerational circle of picketing develops into the toppling, and burning of a parking guard kiosk.

My mother and I were present that night, walking around the parking lot with other families and individuals chanting, “No justice, no peace!” I remember my mother grabbing me from behind and pulling me away from the circle of people that had formed around what news broadcasters referred to as ‘the guard shack’, and led me back to our car to head home as the pockets of demonstrations escalated into the destruction of city property and fires.

I began creating this work by embedding the wood slats with earthen material pastes - soil gathered from a trail head in the Ladera Heights section of Los Angeles, China clay dust and slate dust quarried in the Dartmoor area of the Exeter coast, marble dust from the Yule quarry in Colorado, and ash produced from burned palm tree fronds collected in Los Angeles. As such, the work serves as a material and geographic legend for the materials that appear in the remaining seven new works. The simple title associates this work with the musical instrument, with thoughts of childrens’ xylophones that are often made using bars differentiated by colour.

I then took the still and rotated it at a 135 degree angle and projected it onto the surface. The counterclockwise change in orientation places the originally vertical flames into a horizontal position, making the fire appear more like the curling foam of ocean waves.” - Tomashi Jackson, 2024