DOUBLE TIME

Double Time
Two-Channel Video and Photographs
55 minutes, 2021
Directed and Produced by Ashley Hunt

The second in Ashley Hunt’s trilogy on prison closure and abolition, DOUBLE TIME is a two-channel video and photographic series that introduces the pending closure of Arizona’s Florence Correctional Complex, amidst today’s calls for prison abolition, in dialogue with the Phoenix grassroots organization, Mass Liberation Arizona.

Asking, “How do two times touch?”, it weaves their conversation into the long arc of abolitionist struggle since the Haitian revolution, including its relationship to the U.S. Civil War, and the twin photographic and war-making capacities that drove U.S. settler expansion into the Southwest.

Installed with portraits of plant- and tree-life that surround the Florence Correctional Complex, each one blocking the camera’s view of it, these historical relationships are sewn together by the reflections of community organizers from Mass Liberation as they take up abolitionist work in present-day Phoenix.

Building upon Hunt’s ongoing looking to the growth of natural life that thrives despite the carceral structures in their midsts (which began in Degrees of Visibility), it considers what fugitive, visionary and persevering things emerge from the ruins of power; the second in a trilogy of works including Ashes Ashes and And Water Brings Tomorrow.

Installed at the Arizona State University Art Museum in the exhibition, Undoing Time / Deshacer el Tiempo 2021–22