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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.