| Chicken Scratch is an encrypted elegy—an immersive meditation on the unsolved 1999 murder of Ricky McCormick, whose name is never spoken but whose mystery saturates the canvas. Found in a Missouri cornfield with two pages of handwritten cipher in his pockets, McCormick became the center of one of the FBI’s most enduring cryptographic investigations. The notes—dense, erratic, and possibly meaningless—have defied experts for decades.
Jenkins reconstructs this enigma with layered precision. The canvas is saturated with fragments of McCormick’s cipher—embedded in logos, diagrams, textures, and scrawled overlays. The viewer must decode the painting itself, mirroring the obsessive logic of the case. A McCormick Spices logo appears in the lower left, a visual pun and forensic breadcrumb. A corn diagram references the field where McCormick’s body was found. A mirrored tangle of tree branches creates visual disorientation, echoing the confusion that surrounds the case.
Two laughing figures appear on the left—part of a recurring motif in Jenkins’ code-based works. Their laughter is not joyful; it’s mocking, unreachable. They represent the condition of incomprehension itself, the cruel humor of mysteries that refuse resolution.
On the right, an airplane seating chart is overlaid with broken text and cryptic scrawl. The diagram suggests
the illusion of order—while the cipher resists all attempts at translation.
The title, Chicken Scratch, comes from a quote by McCormick’s mother, Frankie Sparks, after the cipher was released twelve years after his death:
“They told us the only thing in his pockets was the emergency-room ticket. Now, twelve years later, they come back with this chicken-scratch shit.”
Part of the Secret Codes series, Chicken Scratch doesn’t solve the mystery—it becomes it. A meditation on language, paranoia, and the strange poetry of what remains unsaid.
|
