Forthcoming:

Incarcerated Populations: American Prison Perspectives will combine aerial photography and video footage of rarely accessible views of maximum security prisons with counterpoints by contributing field experts on architecture and incarceration policies. The project will confront the growing trends toward increased-security prison systems and the building of more prisons. It is going to be presented as an installation and online, and is intended to serve as a departure point for interdisciplinary discussion forums.

By applying an aesthetic approach to a politically charged subject, I aim to provide an examination of these otherwise off-limits locations at the intersection of art and politics. Incarcerated Populations: American Prison Perspectives will be an inquiry into the representational and symbolic aspects of these prison structures. It will illustrate that prison design and architecture reflect political discourse, economic priorities, and cultural sentiments and insecurities—that, in consequence, these structures also become statements about a society.

This project will also approach the pervasiveness of surveillance technology in contemporary society by turning this back onto the surveillance apparatus of the prison itself—in a sense democratizing the very use of surveillance. My method of image-capture becomes an inseparable part of its photographic content.

This work is intended to be provocative at a time when the U.S. prison population is peaking at unprecedented numbers. But perhaps the most pivotal incentive for addressing these issues at this moment in time is because it coincides with a financial tipping point in maintaining state supermax systems—which, despite continued support by State Departments of Corrections and interest groups, is increasingly becoming fiscally unsustainable. As a whole, Incarcerated Populations: American Prison Perspectives should produce a “time capsule” about maximum security practice in 2012, rather than a complete overview. The commentary of contributing experts will anchor and ground the images, often in hard truths. Imagery and commentary together will produce a channel of facts and details outside of the maelstrom of daily information and image consumption.

The photographic aerial studies in Ciphers  reveal the hidden geometries of sprawl growth that become apparent only when seen from far above the ground. These top-view abstractions show striking parallels between layouts and shapes of otherwise unrelated developments – structures as varied in function as prisons and retirement communities. But all of them clearly demonstrate sprawl as a car dependent phenomenon and as a way of life. These pictures are intended to invoke an era of carefree risk-taking, of “bigger is better,” when investing in home ownership and commercial real estate were still standard practices and neither distance from workplace or city centers nor gasoline prices much mattered in determining the geographic locations of new constructions.

The goal of this work is to connect art with environmental politics and to trigger a discussion about contemporary building trends by looking closely at the ramifications of sprawl – to ask: what is sustainable planning? – particularly at this point in time, when a growing need for new housing is prevalent across the globe.

To further explore these environmental topics within the context of other disciplines, Ciphers was paired with the thoughts of futurist Geoff Manaugh, cultural philosopher Johan Frederik Hartle, urban redevelopment expert Galina Tachieva, and architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss.

A video installation compiled from footage shot from a helicopter over California’s fire-prone regions was made in collaboration with Planet Earth cinematographer Michael Kelem.

Forthcoming.