Artist Statement:
"They taught me how to love.”
- Noël Jiménez
Second Chances Horse Program, Wallkill Correctional Facility, New York
Within law enforcement and prisons, when asked about the presence of horses, officers and inmates continually spoke of connection. Connection to the horse. And oftentimes, connection to other human beings.
My field work with the Newark Mounted Police Unit and the Second Chances Horse Program allowed me to listen to these men’s stories, to learn about how they became police officers, how they became incarcerated people. Their stories are too great to tell in an artist statement.
Through these visuals, these portraits of man and horse, I seek to disarm viewers. We come to a word—police, prisoner—culturally saturated with ideas of who these people are. What images, thoughts, connotations come to mind when you read these words? Through this installation I work to destabilize notions of police and prisoner. To bring us back to what is simply human, or perhaps, simply animal. Through an imagistic rumination on contact and connection across and within species, I hope viewers might reimagine categories, to reimagine humans and other animals, and our basic need for recognition, empathy, and intimacy.
Drawing on her ethnographic research with the Newark Mounted Police Unit in New Jersey and with incarcerated men in the Second Chances Horse Program at the Wallkill Correctional Facility in New York State, Tom's photographic landscape of humans and horses seeks to destabilize notions of the police and the prisoner.