Disappearance Jail (Amador County Jail, CA) by Maria Gaspar
Starting Price: $600
Maria Gaspar
Disappearance Jail (Amador County Jail, CA), 2021-ongoing
20 x 28 in.
Inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Paper
About the Work
Disappearance Jail (2021-ongoing) records the eventual erasure of carceral landscapes in each of the 50 states within the US. Prints depicting current prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities across the US are obscured through perforations using a hole puncher. Images are sourced online, while others can only be found on specialized databases or satellite imagery. The penetrations enact the abolition of carceral sites. Through the gesture of perforation, the sites are rendered fragile – susceptible to disintegration by the slightest touch. Participatory community events or “Punch Parties” have occurred or are planned for Illinois, California, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Texas. Each state is perforated within the state and by local community members.
About the Artist
Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. For the past decade, Gaspar has been recognized nationally for her multi-year projects that attempt to dismantle borders, transcend penal matter, and turn places of precarity into places of possibility. Formative works like “Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall” and the “96 Acres Project” include site interventions at the largest single-site jail in the country, the Cook County Department of Corrections, in her childhood neighborhood.
Gaspar exhibited in Building Radical Soil in 2022 at The Latinx Project.