Painting (Painting)

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.