Solitary Confinement

I started this series with the painting Leave-Taking. Juxtaposing an institution of learning on the left with one of incarceration on the right, I was thinking about how education is a privilege and a tool for advancement and critical thinking. The French philosopher Michel Foucault explained how the Panopticon – the round prison with the guard tower in the middle – is a metaphor for not only being surveilled, but also the kind of learning we do to surveil ourselves. 

I then spent two weeks drawing inside of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Designed by a Quaker architect who thought that isolation would bring inmates closer to God, the practice of isolating inmates has been documented to hasten mental illness. Eastern State was our country’s first penal institution to use solitary confinement on a large scale and stands today as an architectural ruin and museum. The slow process of observational drawing provided me an opportunity to be present in the penitentiary for a sustained period and to reflect on its historical importance. 

When viewing my large graphite drawing Old and New Colossus, you will encounter a building that combines examples of the origins and contemporary practice of solitary confinement in our country (Eastern State and Pelican Bay, respectively). The drawing is inspired by the 18th century artist Giovanni Piranesi, who not only made a famous series of imagined prisons entitled Il Carcieri, but also combined buildings from different regions together into fictionally unified spaces in a series called Capricci, blurring lines between reality and dreamscapes. 

To create work that explores the psychic impact of solitary confinement, I received permission from the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) to recreate drawings made by incarcerated individuals who were included in the 2014 exhibition Solitary: Architecture and Human Rights at UC Berkeley. The words and images made by these men are translated into illusionistic forms in space. The drawings are captured as oversized sculptural presences within solitary confinement cells, serving as proxies for the individuals themselves. Two examples of this series can be seen here: If We Listen to Those who Occupy the Space, and, Drawing Texas Solitary Confinement.

About 4% of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. are in solitary confinement (92,000). Cells for solitary confinement are often the size of a parking space, with enough room to walk two paces, and preventing contact with other humans. It is common that inmates in solitary spend 23 hours per day in these tight spaces. 

In the painting The Gulf, Profoundly Wide, I compare the relatively large-scale and comfort of my own middle-class bedroom with those of inmates at Menard Correctional Facility. In this facility, which is only a 90-minute drive from my home, inmates in disciplinary segregation are forced to share a tiny cell designed for one person. Four of these 4’8” x 10”8” cells – housing eight incarcerated people - fit into my own bedroom. In the center of this gallery, you can stand within the accurately sized floor plan of one of these disciplinary segregation cells.

My works are personal meditations and not intended as journalism. By uniting disparate spaces via complex and intuitive spatial systems, the language of objectivity is made elastic and released into a poetic realm of patiently built worlds of suspended reality.

The technical process shapes interpretation of the iconography towards a meditative posture. Walls play a metaphoric role, at times dynamic and translucent while at other times oppressively stable and impermeable. Spaces expand or compress, bending in geometrically complex ways, promoting a tension between reality and dreams .

Though it is very difficult to imagine life in such inhumane conditions, these works visually explore the architecture of solitary confinement from the past and in the present. I have observed solitary cells no longer in use, translated others’ first-hand accounts of living within this architecture of isolation, and compared such a space to my own.   

20% of the income generated by the sale of these works will go to the John Howard Association. JHA monitors prisons and advances independent oversight of carceral systems to promote humane treatment and increased transparency.