Private Property at AF Projects Los Angeles at 7503 W Sunset

Motorcycle Police (Upside Down), 2021-2022

Acrylic, flashe, and pencil on canvas with aluminum hardware

Installed dimensions for AFP: 120 x 84 x 3 inches

Motorcycle Police (Upside Down), 2021-2022

Acrylic, flashe, and pencil on canvas with aluminum hardware

Installed dimensions for AFP: 120 x 84 x 3 inches

Driverless Car, 2022, Single channel video, 00:10 seconds

Dimensions variable

Video Still from Driverless Car, 2022, Single channel video, 00:10 seconds

Dimensions variable

Footage taken from a post made on Instagram on April 1,2022 by @b.rad916

Private Property

Police departments regularly park empty police cruisers on the street as a strategy for deterring crime and in Cambridge, Massachusetts the local police placed a cardboard cutout of an officer in the Alewife Metro Station towards the same ends. In both scenarios the state concludes that even the image of authority will elicit compliance.

Private Property, an exhibition of new works by Los Angeles based artist Ian Trout, considers the brutal, punitive methods of social control that have come to define the criminal justice system. Like the empty cruiser and the cardboard cutout, the specter of this brutality casts a pall over the works in the exhibition.

Two paintings, titled Motorcycle Police (Upside Down), depict the same enlarged stock image. The scale of the figure is imposing while its inversion suggests an indictment.

Two multi-panel photo works, The Washington Post, August 19, 2014 / The Punisher, Issue 13, 2019 and LawOfficer.com, July 7, 2016 / The Punisher, Issue 13, 2019, combine opinion pieces written by police with panels from a 2019 comic book in which the creators rebuff law enforcement’s use of The Punisher’s skull-shaped symbol. The overtly threatening language in the opinion pieces and The Punisher’s symbol as pro-cop propaganda confirms a culture of fear and impunity.

Driverless Car is a short found-footage work excised from a recent viral video that captured San Francisco police pulling over a driverless car. The banal event is almost comical but only because the absence of another person negates the potential for violence.