Artist Statement

As a child, I had a certain kinship with architecture and materials. My father is a brick mason, so I was no stranger to concrete and cinder blocks when I became homeless and later went to prison.

Since my release, I have begun to examine my relationship to these materials (concrete, masonry, metalworks, etc.) and what they say about our society. As the materials used to make prisons and jails are to infrastructure, so is the physical body of an inmate to public property. With “Public Property #1,” I am bringing all my ideas together for the first time, intermingling the bridges, power lines, and tunnels with razor wire, fences, and the interior space of a cell. The smaller figurative work and larger figure represent the same idea: carceral spaces and capitalism have dehumanized people into fodder, into infrastructure, into raw material.

Biography

Aimee Wissman is a visual artist, filmmaker, arts administrator, curator, social justice activist and mother living in Columbus, Ohio. She is the founder of the Returning Artists Guild, a network of currently and formerly incarcerated artists. Her work was recently featured in the “Marking Time” exhibition at MoMA PS1 and Smithsonian’s FOLKLIFE magazine. To learn more, visit Aimee’s website and follow her on Instagram @aimeeinks.