For his documentary work FELL THE TREES SO THE SKY CAN BEAR WITNESS, Jordan Murphy travelled to sites related to anti-black lynching & mob violence in his home state of Illinois. The work is an attempt to push back against historical amnesia in the North, and his own blind spots as a white American. Through the process of research, it became clear that a lot of this information is inaccurate, vague, or not readily available, and that this type of violence was widespread outside of the ‘traditional South’, so the work should not be considered comprehensive. Much remains to be done in "working off the past“ in the United States. Murphy tries to fill in information, clarifying names of victims and locations where violence occurred. As such, the work was originally presented with a list of those names & locations. It is through doing the work of 'working off the past,' looking at historical wrongs & traumas, that a better future can be moved toward.