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"From Hans Bellmer's grotesquely assembled poupée seductresses in the 1930s-40s to Todd Haynes's 1987 banned masterpiece "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" told with Barbie dolls, artists have frequently turned to the seeming benignity of childhood toys in order to explore the darker realities of adult behavior and desire. For Winter in America, Hank Willis Thomas and collaborator Kambui Olujimi use the dolls Thomas and Willis played with as children, carefully stored for years in a friend's basement. Yet these toys are no longer fantasy objects; Thomas and Olujimi are able to create a gripping tableau because in their attention to detail they achieve such unnerving authenticity."-- from the afterword by Carla WilliamsChallenging and thought-provoking, the photographs in Winter in America are taken from the video collaboration of the same name, a stop-motion animation short film based on the murder of Songha Thomas Willis, who was killed outside of Club Evolutions in Philadelphia on February 2, 2000. Both elements enlist G.I. Joe action figures that the artists once used to create similar violent narratives as children. The packaging for the action figures reads, "for children ages 5+," even though they all come with guns. Through this project the artists examine the breeding of a culture of violence in young boys, who are invited to author violent scenarios before they can even read.