“MIDSENTENCE” examines daily life in a county jail. It lays bare larger truths about incarceration, institutional authority, confinement, shame, innocence, guilt, and power dynamics between those in and out of uniform.
Life inside is embedded and manifested within brutalist architecture, hard/cold materials, sounds, and physicality that evince regiment and social subordination. Concrete, cinder block, metal bars, multitudinous locking systems, fluorescent lighting, bland barely nutritional food, and unpleasant smells reveal a regiment of control and oppression.
Biography
Erik Levine was born in Los Angeles, California in 1960. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, most recently at Ludwig Forum Aachen with a solo survey exhibition of his videos from the past 15 years. His work includes video, sculpture, and drawings, and is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Des Moines Art Center, among several others. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pollock–Krasner Foundation awards. In addition, he’s received two grants each from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as grants from Awards in the Visual Arts, Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.
