In this time of perpetual war abroad, constant vigilance and political division at home, what are the games we play, the stories we tell, to manage unsettling realities? How are fictions deployed and embraced, and to what end? Debi Cornwall’s Necessary Fictions is a forthcoming Radius book and a multimedia installation exploring the performance of American power and identity in this militarized, post-9/11 era.

Debi Cornwall returned to visual expression in 2014 after a 12-year career as a wrongful conviction lawyer. Marrying dark humor and empathy with structural critique, she employs photographs along with archival material, testimony, sound, and video to examine American power and identity in the post-9/11, “War- on-Terror” era. Cornwall studied photography at RISD while completing a degree in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. After working for photographers Mary Ellen Mark and Sylvia Plachy, as an AP stringer, and as an investigator for the federal public defender’s office, she attended Harvard Law School and practiced for more than a decade as a civil rights attorney.

David Chickey is the publisher, designer, and editorial director of Radius Books, a non-profit publishing company based in Santa Fe. He co-founded Radius Books in 2007 with a mission to encourage, promote, and publish books of artistic and cultural value. Radius titles have received national recognition, including multiple awards from AIGA, American Association of Museums Publishing, and best book nominations from The New Yorker, TIME, PDN, Kraszna-Krausz Foundation, and The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation. Chickey is the former board chair of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and a graduate of Sus- sex University, England, and UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar.