The United States imprisons more people than any other country and is one of the world's most unforgiving executioners, yet only a small percentage of people within its borders choose to investigate these practices. Open until May 29, two exhibits at the David Winton Bell Gallery invite visitors to examine our complicity in the penal system.
"The Omega Suites" features Lucinda Devlin's full-color photographs of death chambers, produced through long-exposure shots. The result is sometimes shockingly colorful: "Electric Chair" features a chair coated with the bright yellow paint left over from a school bus.
Devlin's erasure of bodies in her images raises the tension between silencing racial specificity of who sits on death row and the potential for objectification by showing them. By capturing details found within the death chambers themselves (a clock, restraints, gas vials) however, Devlin gestures at the terror of execution procedures. While she focuses on more sanitized, contemporary procedures, one piece, entitled "Gallows," suggests the historical continuity of state executions.
By documenting the death chambers, Devlin suggests something of the culture that produces them. She sometimes positions the viewer as the executioner - voltage monitors and lever within reach - other times, as a spectator in the witness room.
"One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana," featuring people in three Louisiana state prisons, also encourages visitors to question U.S. penal practices. The exhibit draws from a collaboration between photographer Deborah Luster and poet and Professor of English C.D. Wright. The exhibit features Luster's black and white photographs on 4-by-5 inch metallic plates presented both in frames and as loose plates in a black steel cabinet. Wright's poetry is printed on gallery walls and broadcast continually through black phones.
Luster's photographs include "Count," in which a butterfly rests behind a man's shoulder blade. "Robert Earl 'June' Lewis" is named after its subject, who is shown holding a piece of paper with the word "freedom" scrawled in all caps and a photograph of a pregnant woman whose stomach protrudes out of her white t-shirt. The latter is juxtaposed with the exhibit's only out-of-focus shot: a mother and child in joyful embrace.
Documenting burns and scars, Luster's pictures testify to the brutality their subjects have survived. Whether these markings resulted from interpersonal or state violence seems insignificant. All are mapped back to the site of the prison.
By working in black and white, Luster risks locating her subjects in the distant past, rather than in the immediacy of the present. She said, however, that she meant to "suggest the history of the penal system." Indeed, those convicted of crime seem exempt from the abolition of slavery as Black Codes enabled Southern states to criminalize emancipated people for petty crimes, using their labor en masse through convict leasing.
Selections from Wright's poetry point to this continued unfreedom. "Black is the Color," Wright asserts on the wall of the exhibit's entrance, of "77% of the inmates at Angola ... Of 66% of the inmates at St. Gabriel / Of the executioner's corduroy hood / hung on an ice hook / in the tool shed / away from the kids." In one of the recordings, Wright cites punishment industry giants Corrections Corporations of America and Wackenhut, alluding to the continuing entanglement of prisons and profit.
The exhibit invites visitors to hold the loose plates in the black steel cabinet and to arrange and re-arrange them, perhaps its most fascinating element.
Herein lies a remarkable historical resonance with the photo-tourism - maybe even desire - of postcards taken home from lynching parties and of photos from Abu Ghraib. By revealing the power we have to hold the images, catalogue them and the lives they portray - even refuse them - the exhibit implicates all of us. Our hands are dirtied - we become the prison guard.
The exhibit suggests that all who make contact - artists, curator, gallery, visitors - are complicit in sanctioning our growing prison-state.
Many of the questions that arise from white artists - even white women artists - producing documentary work at the crossroads of race, class, power and exploitation are present here and in Devlin's work, too. Their unabashed use of the word "inmate" - language defined by the state, language with which few people in prison actively identify - reveals their dependence upon and collaboration with the state for access to their subjects. Their work is mediated by that compromise.
Even as Luster and Wright emphasize the humanity of their subjects, they run the risk of enhancing, rather than destabilizing, a free-world consciousness where the oppressive realities of the justice system tend to morph into exploitative, commodified, exotified imagery - "prison towns prison motels prison movies prison books prison dreams," Wright reads.
All in all, both exhibits seem to ask what it means to participate in a culture that prefers to make people whom the state fundamentally disrespects disappear through policies we sanction. For that, they are well worth a look.
