Exhibitions in a prison - save the date!
Far Beyond the Walls
Upcoming Exhibition, June - 30 September 2024
Opening Reception
22 June 3pm - 7pm
Please RSVP by June 17th as tickets are limited.
Entry is by donation, 100% of the donation goes to the Nevada State Prison Preservation Society to help build and maintain their museum on the premises.
Visits will be by appointment over the next 4 months, dates will be added to the Exhibition Page, maximum tour capacity 15 people each art + prison tour.
This deeply immersive exhibition involves 22 artists, 7 solo exhibitions and 2 group shows.
The exhibitions will take place concurrently within the cell blocks, medical and culinary spaces of the historic and recently decommissioned Nevada State Prison in Carson City, Nevada.
The objective and intention of this exhibition is to move public awareness towards an understanding of the issues surrounding incarceration in the US, both historically and currently.
Visitors will experience aspects of this collective societal issue through the eyes of formerly incarcerated individuals and artists responding to the prison spaces through their own prisms and perspectives.
Our aim is to humanize those directly affected and open transformative channels for dialog.
FAR BEYOND THE WALLS CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Far Beyond the Walls exhibition, is a collaboration between the Nevada State Prison Preservation Society, curator Frances Melhop, and Melhop Gallery º7077. Together we open a conversation by shining a beam of light on the topic of incarceration. With more than 2 million people behind bars in the USA, this is a growing situation that needs to be acknowledged, thought about, and reframed.
This project began to germinate in 2020 when friend and historian, Lisa Jayne, asked me to photograph the decommissioned Nevada State Prison for a research project she was working on. During the day of photography, through the intense experience of the silent prison spaces and grounds, the extreme desert heat and lack of humidity, and stories from a former guard, I was deeply affected by the place.
Over the following months the kernel of an idea for an exhibition began to develop. It couldn’t be an ordinary white cube commercial exhibition, it had to be relevant, experiential, and contextual. I began to research the issue and discover artists working with incarceration as a major theme.
The artists selected approach the subject from various perspectives and backgrounds. The idea is not to create a didactic exhibition but to show artists’ responses to the mass incarceration situation in the US through various art mediums, and fields of view, while giving visitors the opportunity to also experience physical carceral spaces and potentially expand or transform preconceived ideas regarding humans in captivity…. READ MORE HERE
