These Walls
"A-Unit Kinross Daily Lives," Koya Dogon
In her seminal abolitionist text, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis posits that one of the reasons we may take the existence of prisons for granted is that we are inundated by its imagery. We regularly consume images of prison through film, television, music, and other media, even if we do not seek them out. Just scrolling through a popular streaming app might expose you to true crime documentaries, police procedurals, prestigious dramas set in prison, and unscripted shows that follow incarcerated people. As Davis writes, “The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment.”
But despite this deluge of images of the prison, we have far less access to genuine insights into what it is like to live and survive in incarceration. The artists featured here fill that cultural lacuna. Crucially, they offer the viewer insight into what it feels like to be incarcerated–in its violence as well as its mundanity. They provide insight into what ethnographers might call the affective experience of incarceration–the embodied, emotional experience of confinement.
Take for instance Koya Dogon’s A-Unit Kinross Daily Lives. Here the artist provides a glimpse into a ubiquitous prison activity–calling home. Two figures face away from the viewer, concentrating on their phone calls to loved ones. The housing unit is visible down the hallway to the left, where someone leans on a railing, watching. A variety of signage decorates the walls in the foreground–signs reminding incarcerated people of their rights to be free from sexual abuse and glimpses of murals that decorate the unit. What is most striking about Dogon’s work is its mundanity. This is not a scene of fantastic violence that might populate mass media. Rather it is the daily, slow violence that separates incarcerated people from their loved ones.
R.C. Fisher’s Offender Cup offers another glimpse into the mundane and defamiliarizes both its subject and its medium. Here the artist depicts his cup, an object that he uses every day and one that is instantly familiar to the viewer. But this is not just a cup–it is an offender cup. In Fisher’s world, even the human act of drinking is marked by incarceration. The drawing is made on white printer paper, a ubiquitous material. But this paper is not only a blank page, but is also an artifact of the artist’s incarceration. Fischer has drawn his cup on the back of a callout sheet, a printed list that incarcerated people receive each day that delineates their schedule and programs. The bottom right corner of the page is turned up, with the text “BARAGA MAX” just visible, indicating that the artist was at one time incarcerated at Michigan’s most remote prison.
Other artists use metaphor to help us understand life inside the walls. Smoove’s Life Inside a Sunken Ship analogizes the prison itself as wreckage at the ocean floor–perhaps forgotten or perhaps desperately searched for. A shark swims through the underwater prison hallway. Smoove is intentionally ambiguous about the symbolism of the shark–does he represent a threatening officer or a liberated incarcerated person? Regardless of how the viewer might answer that question, the pressure of the water all around is unmistakable.
The artists featured here challenge the viewer to go beyond the voyeuristic impulse simply to look inside the prison. Indeed, the simple act of looking might repeat the cultural normalization of the prison that Angela Davis warns against. Instead these artists ask–what will you do, now that you have seen our humanity?
By: Nora Krinitsky
