THE EXHIBITION

BROKEN ON A WHEEL traces the history and economies of punishment through image-making, objects, and gestures to think through our proximity to the prison industrial complex as an ongoing militarized project. Using soap, food trays, and the mugshot, the project engages in a material inquiry between shared municipal spaces that are the closest to, and take from, the body in order to ask: Does one ever recover from incarceration? What is the history of institutionalized violence?

Continuing an inquiry into exposure, both ideological and discursive, BROKEN ON A WHEEL uses photographic space to compare the aesthetics and history of institutional architecture, industrialized violence, and carceral geographies. Taking its name from Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Broken On A Wheel describes the transition of the sovereign’s power of public execution to penitentiary practices, where punishment was intended to better equivocate the crime. In 1789, this shift was experienced in much of Europe, France, and specifically Austria.

Approaching the project as an artist working in education, the exhibition seeks to make linkages between carceral and institutional environments analyzing forms of controlled spatial collectivity. In doing so, Paz traces modern prison reform to better understand the proximity to corporal punishment and its lasting psychological and global effect on lives, families, and communities.

THE ARTIST 

Dan Paz is a visual artist whose work brings a critical and aesthetic lens to the architecture of space, developing projects that build a genealogy of how power articulates itself through image production and access to information. Motivated by familial relationships to incarceration, Paz researches the commodification of lives to further understand, through image-making and emergent technologies, how light and shadow are used as a mechanism of power. In addition to questioning traditional representational modalities with a research-based approach to the labor and circulation of images, Paz uses an expanded approach to ‘imaging’ through mimicry and fidelity in cast and sculptural objects. Paz’s projects and collaborations have been featured in Hayward Gallery London, UK; the 12th Havana Biennial, Havana, CU; The Media lab, NYC; The Lee Center for the Arts, The Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA; Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR. 

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