Steven Cochrane:

When presented with the theme of "Reconstruction," my thoughts turned immediately to Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War, a failed venture that, in being prematurely abandoned, helped to cement the depressed economy and interracial hostility that, in the eyes of many, still characterizes the region. To deal with this abstractly, I chose to introduce a simple geometric pattern, a quilt block pattern now known as "churn dash," that, in southern states following the Civil War, was known as "Sherman's March," in reference to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's still-controversial scorched earth campaign in Confederate Georgia. My hope was to witness how a rigid and arbitrary structure, when introduced into the collaborative setting, would either guide that collaboration of be subverted and/or eradicated by it. I also sought to correlate the group labor and "remixing" of imagery inherent to the project with the group labor and patchwork aesthetic of traditional quilting.

Sample Works:

Talking Points


Interlocutor IV


Interlocutor


Per Capita Income of States Participating in the American Civil War, 1961