Trevor Paglen

April 29 – May 28, 2005
Recording Carceral Landscapes
@ The LAB
2948 16th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
415.864.8855
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1-6 PM

Friday, April 29, 6-9 PM: Opening Reception

Thursday, May 12, 8 PM
Panel Discussion: Everything You Think You Know About Prisons is Wrong
$3-$15 sliding scale admission, no one turned away for lack of funds
Within the context of Trevor Paglen’s exhibition, Cynthia Chandler (Justice Now), Rachel Herzing (Critical Resistance), Doug Spalding (California Prison Focus), and AC Thompson (SF Guardian) tackle the issues of globalization, imperialism and the prison industrial complex. The panel will look at how the prison system is not merely comprised of the prisons themselves, but how it is a fundamental structure of our society’s organization.

Thursday, May 26, 8 PM
Artist’s Talk - Closing Reception
Trevor Paglen will discuss the Carceral Landscapes project, lead a walk-through of the exhibition, and answer questions from audience members. A closing reception will follow.

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This project is a long-term engagement with California’s prison system – the third largest prison system in the world behind China and the US as a whole. Composed of audio recordings, video, print media, photography, performance, and expanded sculptural practices, the project involves developing tools with which to describe, explain, and witness California’s carceral machine.

Working as an artist-in-residence with the grassroots prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance, the exploration of- and interventions into- this landscape has and continues to take the artist from the bowels of Pelican Bay super-max prison in the Northwest, to the desert work-camps and private prisons of California’s Southeast, and from the innermost chambers of Sacramento, through the San Francisco financial community, to the communities that one mother characterized as “missing a generation of young men.”

This project is a collaboration between Trevor Paglen and Critical Resistance, a grassroots network of prison abolitionists.

RECORDING CARCERAL LANDSCAPES

The California prison boom which begun in the early 1980’s coincides with the ascent of economic neoliberalism or corporate globalization. The late 20th Century wave of economic restructuring dismantled the welfare state, deregulated corporate trade and financing, and produced a continuing decline in real wages. Since the economic crisis of the 1970’s, the local, national, and global economies have created a world that is increasingly bifurcated between the haves and have-nots.

A confluence of political, economic and ideological interests fuels prison construction and expansion. Politicians sowing fear among their constituencies reap political capital from a veritable arms race of “tough-on-crime” legislation. Rural economies devastated by disappearing manufacturing jobs are eager to attract any form of perceived income. Financiers eager to offer high-interest loans to the state help legislators concoct complex bond schemes for prison construction. Law Enforcement and prison guard interests see immediate dividends from prison expansion in the form of increased salaries and political clout. An ideological climate dominated by perpetual war, from drugs to terrorism, provides justification for the coercive social and economic policies that increasingly characterize the United States. In 1980, California had 12 prisons and incarcerated 24,000 people. There are now 33 prisons, one under construction, and over 160,000 people held in cages. A total increase of 554% and an increase in the population of incarcerated women by 850%.

California now has the distinction of operating the 3rd largest prison system in the world, trailing only behind China and the US as a whole. As the number of prison walls increases, so does the level of secrecy about what goes on behind them. After a series of news stories and lawsuits documenting egregious mistreatment of prisoners at Pelican Bay and other prisons in 1993, the California Department of Corrections imposed a media ban on all of its facilities. This ongoing ban prohibits journalists from face-to-face interviews, eliminates prisoners' rights to confidential correspondence with media representatives, and bars the use of cameras, recording devices, and writing instruments when conducting interviews. Two bills have been passed by the legislature to overturn the media ban: the first was vetoed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson in 1997, and the second vetoed by Democratic Governor Grey Davis in 1999.