December 15, 2015 - 16:50
I didn’t initially realize how difficult it would be to discuss, reflect upon, and try to explain the complex and multiple layers of the prison-industrial complex that people’s projects portrayed. I was particularly impressed and appreciated the conversations I had following the gallery opening, listening to people share stories of the different connections they made between their projects and others, as well as how they chose to express the research they had completed. I especially appreciated how people’s artwork was incorporated into the shared space. Our collective work about challenging and seeking to understand incarceration seeped through conversations and the silences of what was unknown and left unexplained. I appreciated the incorporation of different perspectives and ways people showed how they see their own lives intersecting with those they studied. I think our diverse audience and their different levels of familiarity with the content we were displaying added different layers of knowing and understanding to our projects.
It was quite profound to see how some chose to express their emotional, physical, mental, and personal connections with their projects and how others chose to represent people they had read about and studied in a more formal and possibly removed manner.
Since we had so much freedom in representation, people were given the opportunity to explain more or less about their project. It was interesting how some people seemed to feel that their pieces had a voice of their own, while others described their research more explicitly, such as Tong in her representation of Mass Incarceration and Asians in the Prison-Industrial Complex. I was also intrigued and challenged by the conversations afterwards, especially our collective struggles to explain and define certain ideas that are so complex and beg so many questions.
I was drawn to Karis’ multi-layered representations of the history of prisons, explaining how certain issues led to the strict schedules in prisons. I was also intrigued by what class discussions, readings, and collective group experiences sparked my classmates’ interests and how they drew connections between research and personal experiences. Building on our collective discussions, the exhibit was a way to physically connect people through representations of what people had been struggling with and seeking to understand and represent throughout the semester. I want to recognize the vulnerability of my classmates in their openness to describe their fraught processes and actually express how they could have completed some of their projects differently or conveyed different messages.
I appreciated how the exhibit felt both “complete” and flexible to change, and invited input. People who walked through our exhibit seemed to influence and shape our understandings of our projects. People seemed to toil over drawing meaning from our representations of marginalization, crime, and injustice. I think Abby and Meera’s pieces helped enforce and clarify the notion that we are not separate from the people that we are studying; prison walls and structures attempt to marginalize certain groups of people and to quell dissent. Prison acts as an institutional silencing of voices that have been deemed “destructive, violent, and unnecessary.” Yet, Meera and Abby, among others, connected these marginalized voices and experiences to our own lives, forcing on-lookers to examine our role in shaping and abolishing the prison-industrial complex. Other people’s voices seemed to shape our collective ways of discussing the diverse and interlocking topics we researched. I think Meera and Abby’s project demonstrated how exposing the injustices and inequalities in the different facets of the prison-industrial complex is an act of resistance. As a collective, we are literally and figuratively uncovering the constructs of our racist, sexist, classicist, and over-policed society.
These projects were an act of dissent as they exposed the truths and injustices of capitalism, mass incarceration, socio-economic inequality, and the great efforts of companies and individuals to silence and hide our collective pains. Viewing someone’s suffering as connected to my and others well-being challenges the oppressive ideas of “us vs. them.” By questioning how we define “criminals” and what purpose they serve in our society, we are subsequently examining and deconstructing these process of denial and separation.
Butterfly Wings’ “play” with identity, words, and agency was extremely powerful and seemed to profoundly collaborate many of my and others’ thoughts about silence, identity, and the difficulties of conveying or representing someone’s story. I couldn’t help but relating her project to Eva in Eva’s Man who finds agency and a sense of power in certain chosen silences.
I am so grateful to have been a part of such a complex, multi-layered, tense and fruitful process. People’s energy, concern, and motivation were evident throughout the different artworks. Resistance is uplifting.