Having attended High School just down the road from Holmesburg Prison, I couldn’t resist tagging along when my friend Jenn suggested that we check out a unique Art Exhibit at Moore College of Art that featured works created within the walls of The Holmesburg Prison (now closed).
The exhibit is: Doing Time – Depth of Surface. Artists, Patricia Gómez Villaescusa and María Jesús González Fernández use a unique process called, Strappo, to detach, preserve and recreate the walls of the prison. The exhibit is very unique and includes wall transfers, monoprints, audio and video.
The exhibit was both disturbing and intriguing. I couldn’t help but to look at the art work and think about the prisoners and how they may have spent their days. It is something that I can’t imagine and felt myself becoming very empathetic. Particularly, it was disturbing to see the transfers of the cell walls. Below are a few iphone photos that I snapped:
Even more disturbing is when my friend Jenn informed me about the clinical trials that took place at the prison. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia which speaks of a book that was written specifically about this:
“Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison is a 1998 book by Allen M. Hornblum, published by Routledge, ISBN 0-415-91990-8. The book documents clinical non-therapeutic medical experiments on prison inmates at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia from 1951 to 1974, conducted under the direction of dermatologist Albert Kligman.[1] The title of the book is a reference to Kligman’s reaction on seeing hundreds of prisoners when he entered the prison: “All I saw before me were acres of skin” … “It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time”.”
Wow.
Anyway, if you are near Moore or want to make the trip, it is a very interesting exhibit. You can read and see more about the exhibit here:
http://www.philagrafika.org/gomez-and-gonzalez.html
http://www.printeresting.org/tag/doing-timedepth-of-surface/