Thou Art... Will Give... Emerging Artist Exhibition by Eric Kunsman

My Thoughts

When installing the Thou Art... Will Give… exhibition, Kunsman requested that I have full range of the narrative, and with such a unique space as the Ameristar Gallery I had so many opportunities to showcase this amazing series of works. My main goal when putting pieces together was looking at the depth that each provided while also playing a visual game with the viewer of making them lean closer to view details and read the logbooks which were ever so important, to standing back and imagining the space that the camera captured. Light and darkness were major factors in this exhibition which held all black and white photography, something that stands out quite starkly in a yellow painted room. And so I try to utilize the more haunted images that Kunsman had provided; images that would invoke the viewer to imagine a person in the frame. Images such as hallways, the cafeteria, doorways, cellrooms, all spaces which seemed out of place when there wasn’t a person to fill the context, where the writings of the Warden’s logbooks would create context. Of course not every prisoner had a name, but only a description, reducing them to a number or a slur, and so we can only recognize that there was a person who attempted redemption. 

I do hope that with every viewer who comes into the gallery space to see the exhibition walks away with a solemn understanding of what the Eastern State Penitentiary was, and how the viewer can reflect on the similarities of these images to our current judicial and prison system of today's America which hasn’t changed much since the 1800s. That the viewer walks away from this exhibition knowing that there were, and are, people who live within crumbling rooms like the ones on display and also live as an entry on a page of a logbook.