Hog feed 102

2022 - Painting (Painting)

121.92 x 132.08 cm

Jared Owens

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Hog feed 102 is an exemplary work by Jared Owens that combines two of the artist’s primary signatures: the use of soil smuggled out of the grounds at F. C. I. Fairton, a prison in which Owens was incarcerated, and the stowage diagram of the Brookes slave ship. This diagram from 1788 is a logistical blueprint of how to pack Black bodies efficiently, in tiered serial form, into the hold of a ship. Merging these vocabularies, Owens has laced a burlap sack for pig feed into the work to advance a multi-layered commentary on American prisons as ostensible ‘human farms’ that dehumanize inmates by turning them into a commodity for the prison industrial complex. The work also point to incarceration as a form of stock labor, with a legacy stretching back to the history of American chattel slavery. The US carceral state grossly affects Black to white people at a ratio of more than 5:1, not to mention those on parole or elsewhere mishandled by the injustice system. Hidden within this historic parallel, Owens’s work ridicules the idea that American slavery ended in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment. The act abolished involuntary servitude—but did so with the exemption that forced labor is still sanctioned as a legal, and culturally acceptable, form of punishment for inmates. It is by no accident that Owens’s frequent collaborator, the curator, art historian, and activist Nicole Fleetwood, repeatedly uses the word “punitive” to describe the prison system, invoking the legal framework that various contemporary reform activists, such as Ava DuVernay, have demonstrated perpetuates slavery through other means.

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During more than 18 years of collective incarceration, Jared Owens became a self-taught artist, working in painting, sculpture, and installation, using materials and references culled from penal matter. While imprisoned three times, across three different states, Owens began his practice by studying materials that he had access to while in prison, including art magazines, books, encyclopaedias, and critics reviews in newspapers, as well as through collaboration with other inmates. The multidisciplinary artist’s practice calls attention to the struggles of nearly 2.5 million people under the control of the American carceral state, raising critiques concerning the legality and morality of the prison industrial complex.

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Colors:

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• bondage.n.02
• racism.n.01
• imprisonment.n.01
• labor.n.01
• materiality.n.02