DEGREES OF VISIBILITY
Installation of Degrees of Visibility at Bolivar Art Gallery, University of Kentucky, 2016
“Degrees of Visibility” is a large body of landscape studies that look upon the spaces that surround prisons, jails and detention centers throughout all 50 U.S. states and territories.
Each is shot from a publicly accessible point of view how those spaces show and conceal punishment and the growing scale of mass incarceration. Sitting at the limits of what a photograph can describe, each image is shot from a publicly available point of view and titled according to the number of people who are imprisoned but concealed within that landscape. The images focus less upon what each prison looks like or the visual state of its prisoners, and more upon how they are hidden, sitting among different forms of land use, geographies, and the histories of control and rebellion they hold — wondering if there is a politics of visibility that makes mass incarceration materially possible.
Shown as a photography exhibition of different sizes, depending on the context, each exhibition is conceptualized in dialogue with local grassroots organizations and accompanied by a FREE NEWSPAPER that situates the project’s ideas in what is happening on the ground locally.
