Philagrafika has commissioned Spanish artists Patricia Gómez Villaescusa and María Jesús González Fernández to create Doing Time | Depth of Surface, an exhibition exploring the architecture and stories of Philadelphia’s historic Holmesburg Prison. Gómez and González have created large-format “printings” of drawings, paintings and graffiti left by former inmates on the walls of the prison, which opened in 1896, operating for nearly a century and being decommissioned in 1995. The exhibition gives a voice to the guards, employees and inmates who lived in the Northeast Philadelphia prison.
The first phase of the project began with an extensive residency, during which the artists conducted research and onsite documentation of the project. The artists visited Holmesburg Prison where they utilized a unique method of monoprinting to transfer the history of the deteriorating prison’s walls into prints, salvaging the outer surfaces of the prison cells. The exhibition at Moore will feature a surveillance-style video installation along with an audio installation, still photographs from the residency and the resulting monoprints – two full cell size and 150 smaller pieces – which serve as a physical archive of the prison cells and the lives of the prisoner’s who lived in them.
Gómez and González work in a collaborative process grounded in an artistic practice similar to mural conservation. Utilizing a modified version of a conservation technique known as strappo, they work primarily to preserve the surfaces of buildings – the veritable “skin of architecture” – by detaching a wall’s surface layers. Using a layer of fabric and glue they remove the surface, in its entirety, in a process much like ripping a bandage off of skin. In fact Strappo, an Italian word, means to rip or tear. This process allows the artist’s to extract a tangible record of the site in its current state, preserving the expressions of identity, memory, apathy and desire of its former residents.
