Public Property #1 by Aimee Wissman Painting

I was "incarcerated" long before I went to prison and I am fortunate to have survived addiction and abuse. As a child, I can remember a certain kind of kinship to architecture and materials. My father is a brick mason, so I was no stranger to concrete and cinderblocks when I became homeless and later, incarcerated. Since my release, I have begun to examine and explore my relationship to these materials: concrete, masonry, metalworks, etc. and I realize that carceral material is to infrastructure, as the physical body of an inmate is to public property. The knowledge of the sameness of these spaces despite their variance in construction, and the balance of invisibility with monstrous necessity, has deeply impacted my own understanding of my lived experience, my beliefs about capitalism and personal responsibility, and my drive to create more artwork. With “Public Property #1” I am intermingling the bridges, power lines, and tunnels of my homeless youth with the razor wire, fences, and the interior space of a cell. The smaller figurative work and larger figure represent the same idea: Carceral spaces in specific, Capitalism in general, has dehumanized people into fodder, into infrastructure, into raw material.