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An Artist Built a Jail Outside Philadelphia's City Hall
By citylab.com- John Metcalfe
Published: 10/08/2015

Walk around Philadelphia with your head stuck in your smartphone and you might suddenly find yourself in jail. For the city’s Open Source festival, Sam Durant has plopped a 40-by-40-foot prison on a public plaza.

Durant’s multimedia work often incorporates political themes—his “Proposal for Public Fountain” is a protester being hosed down by a police truck—and “Labyrinth,” sited across from City Hall, is no different. Leading up to its construction, the L.A.-based artist spent time with inmates at Pennsylvania’s Graterford State Correctional Institution and released prisoners at the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program’s apprenticeship initiative. The resulting installation is a comment on the “quagmire of the criminal justice system,” according to the festival’s organizers:

The public will be invited to interact with the maze by hanging personal items on the structure, using it as a platform to address issues surrounding mass incarceration. Initially the structure will be transparent, and as the public interacts with the art, it will become opaque. The maze functions as a double metaphor, symbolizing not only the struggle of criminals caught in the Department of Corrections but for how, as a society, we are all navigating the labyrinth of mass incarceration.

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