kneeler

this is the work i was writing about earlier that involved the prison jumpsuit. i made this in september of 05 for the InSight show at the Claremont Graduate College gallery (curated by Caroline Maxwell).

The work is a reflection on the detainees at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States is holding more than 500 foreign detainees at the prison. These men have been deprived of basic legal and civil rights, and reports of abuse, torture and grotesque mistreatment are rampant. Many, if not most, of the detainees have been there nearly four years, yet in all that time, only four have been accused of any crime. And even then, military prosecutors recently charged the military trials against those four have been rigged.

approximately 85% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. I was raised catholic, but stopped going to church somewhere after high school because i could not reconcile the teachings of Christ with church doctrine. From an early age i was already unable to understand the catholic attitudes towards women, homosexuality, minorities, sex and on and on. So i packed up the ideas and i left the vatican.

the piece questions our collective hypocrisy as a "christian nation". My own included... at the least i still pay taxes which pay for those prisons. It requires participation to be activated, something i am very interested in in my work. When the participator kneels, the image of thhe prisoners is activated on the wall in front of them (yay for me figuring out simple wiring!). The participators then find themselves in the same bodily gesture as the kneelers.

They also see the orange of the prison jumpsuit and perhaps realize that they are kneeling on the same jumpsuit. I used actual used prison jumpsuits to upholster the kneeler. in a final touch i used memory foam for the padding to achieve a muscle/flesh feel and of course leave the mark for a moment after the person stands back up.

I found out after the show that several people reported feeling "forced" to participate with this work, or were "forced" to feel guilty.

How very interesting.