TRAVAILS OF JAIL
There is substantial debate about the value of incarceration as a form of punishment, and about the idea of reform. Opinions vary wildly and clash intensely, but this conversation isn’t usually at the forefront of public consciousness.
We rarely think about people in jail, and perhaps this is in part because we cannot see them, because they are invisible, silenced and powerless. Do they all deserve to be so? The now-empty Good Year Tyre and Auto Warehouse is a cold, terse space of concrete and brick. It’s an appropriate venue for this unique exploration, which is based on the work of eight people: four artists, and four inmates from Risdon prison. There are challenges: legally, one may not show the face or play a film or audio recording of an inmate.
This hurdle was overcome by pairing them with four early-career artists, effectively making the inmates artists themselves. The resulting works are mostly video, although there are sculptural and interactive elements. Each work in this show has it successes.
Tether, an abstracted animation that explores the dreams of a female inmate is a gorgeous work of smeared colours that aches with a subconscious longing for protection. The work explores obsessive behaviours but also reveals how someone copes with a life of trauma.
The Only Way Out is Up explores time and imagines an economy made of potatoes: something, it turns out, inmates rarely get. This is probably the most playful work, noting the incarcerated can and do imagine worlds in which they have more agency, reaching toward hope to sustain themselves.
The Opaque Citizen is a rich essay of a work, a script made from conversations between an artist and an inmate with great directness. It pulls few punches and presents a strong critique of class in Australia, but it also allows the artist to reflect on their place in that structure. Part of what this work does so well is point to a system that none of us are free from. This work incorporates rough computer modelling along with actors to stand in for the invisible inmate, and it creates a voice with a strong thesis. Not everyone will agree with the ideas here, but this is not a didactic work: it asks for debate, not agreement.
The Quiet Strength, an endurance performance, is deceptively simple: the artist lifts heavy sandstone to head height and then drops it, again and again. The action is repetitive, the effort tiring and the strain of continuing as exhaustion arrives is ultimately harrowing.
The symbolism is harsh and blatant: this is what prison is, it keeps going and it hurts, and only willpower will allow survival. The devastating climax of this work hits hard, but so does the entire show.
The Pink Palace is a fine demonstration of the potential for art to ask hard, necessary questions, and Constance ARI is to be commended for this bold project.
It is a triumph.