UCR ARTSblock presents the exhibition:

Geographies of Detention: From Guantánamo to the Golden Gulag

June 1 – September 7, 2013*

California Museum of Photography, UCR ARTSblock

UCR ARTSblock presents Geographies of Detention: From Guantánamo to the Golden Gulag, on view at the California Museum of Photography from June 1 through September 7, 2013. The exhibition is guest curated by Catherine Gudis, Molly McGarry, and graduate students from the UCR Public History Program: Leann Do, Jay Hartzell, Kristen Hayashi, Corinne Knight, Sean Milanovich, Karen Raines, Carolyn Schutten, Megan Suster, Jennifer Thornton, David Wagner, and Jennifer Weed.

Presented on two floors of the California Museum of Photography, Geographies of Detention offers a nuanced investigation into incarceration and its architectures. One portion of the exhibition highlights work by artists Sandow Birk, Alyse Emdur, and Richard Ross, each of whom explores different aspects of imprisonment. Geographies of Detention also includes the traveling exhibit the “Guantánamo Public Memory Project,” an examination of the over 100-year history of the US naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The main gallery of the museum is devoted to the contemporary context and landscape of California’s own “golden gulag.” Prison populations in California have grown 500% in the last decades even as crime rates subside, and prison spending continues to outweigh state funding for public education. A selection of hauntingly evocative paintings by Sandow Birk from his series “Prisonation” (2001) reflects on the growth of California’s prison industrial complex by engaging its geographic context. Taking inspiration from pictorial genres of landscape painting, including those popularized by the Hudson River School in the 19th century, each of Birk’s paintings depicts one of California’s state prisons, from Pelican Bay in Northern California to Centinela State Prison at the US–Mexico border.

While Birk’s work shows the prisons from afar, Richard Ross and Alyse Emdur take the viewer inside these structures. In his series of photographs “Architecture of Authority” (2007), Ross explores the built environment of prisons, revealing the spatial logic used to exert power over the bodies incarcerated within. Emdur’s large-scale photographs of prison visiting rooms and collected letters and snapshots (some of which appear in her 2013 book, Prison Landscapes) offer a more intimate vision of inmates posing with their visitors against murals in fantasy landscapes of freedom. Presented together, the works of Birk, Ross, and Emdur meditate on the “carceral state” of California.

The “Guantánamo Public Memory Project” combines historical and contemporary photography, film, and first-person audio interviews to examine how the naval base has been “closed” and reopened for more than a century leading up to the attacks on September 11, 2001. These new perspectives on Guantánamo’s history as a “legal black hole” provoke discussions about the limits of democracy and the meaning of mass incarceration in a global present and future.

Collaboratively curated by eleven universities (including UCR), the “Guantánamo Public Memory Project” is comprised of a deeply researched traveling exhibit, as well as a website (www.gitmomemory.org), blog, and ongoing public conversation. The panel produced by graduate students in UCR’s Public History Program examines Guantánamo as an international symbol of America’s War on Terror and a lightning rod for debates about torture, detention, national security, and human rights.

Visit artsblock.ucr.edu for the schedule of related programs.

*The “Guantánamo Public Memory Project” will be on view as part of Geographies of Detention through August 10, 2013.

This exhibition was made possible in part by the generous support of Dean Stephen Cullenberg, UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the UCR History Department’s Friends of Public History.

California Museum of Photography Sweeney Art Gallery
Culver Center of the Arts University of California, Riverside
3834 Main Street Riverside, CA 92501 951.827.3755