Featuring hammer heads, barbed wire, chain, and a horse shoe, Accord (2017) belongs to Melvin Edwards's celebrated series of Lynch Fragments. Titled in honor of the artist's studio in Accord, New York, the disparate objects and materials that inform the structure of Accord invite complimentary and conflicting readings of oppression, industry, creation, and violence. Edwards often incorporates chain and barbed wire into his work because of the multiple uses both materials have. (Chains, for example, while symbolizing human connections, are also tools of bondage and oppression; similarly, barbed wire is frequently used to imprison and separate populations.) Ultimately capitalizing on this disjuncture, Edwards explained to the curator Catherine Craft in 2013, “Using barbed wire, you have to be aware that it was a way to keep the cows at home. But then people turned it into concentration camps. Before it happened with Jewish people in World War II, it happened in Namibia. Those contradictions, or contradistinctions are things that have occupied me in visual art. As a way to realize the dynamic in a situation, art or otherwise, they’re very important to me.”