Broken On A Wheel
Broken On A Wheel takes its name from Michel Foucault’s "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" and seeks to describe the transition of the sovereign’s power of public execution to penitentiary practices, where punishment was intended to better equivocate the crime. Broken On A Wheel traces the economies of punishment through image-making, objects, and gestures to think through our proximity to the prison industrial complex as an ongoing militarized project. The research seeks to make linkages between carceral and institutional environments by analyzing forms of controlled spatial collectivity to foreground the relationship between the manipulation of light and shadow and the management of social and political power. Using text, food trays, and the mugshot as documentary forms, the project engages in a material inquiry between shared municipal spaces that are the closest to, and take from, the body in order to ask: Does one ever recover from incarceration? How does the control of light and shadow participate in the control over one’s body?
solo exhibition with Entre Gallery, Vienna, Austria 2022
pictured above, scrolling white text on a black background:
In 1975 Foucault wrote “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms” (HD Video, TRT 5min); [right] Standard Bath Towel, Standard WashCloth (Woven, Glazed Porcelain, Upholstery Thread)
Stack for Andrea at Highland Elementary, 1978-84, #2 (Unglazed, homemade, porcelain lunch trays)
In 2020 I purchased and downloaded one of my father’s mugshots from a third-party criminal-search website for $29.99. My father died in 2009. (Copper-plate Photogravure and Embossed print on hand-made paper)
Supermax Food Tray, Tough, insulated, will not retain water, long-lasting to save replacement costs (lids sold separately), $214, Cortech (bronze, supermax food tray)