'Apokaluptein' and more at Eastern State in 2015

This year, five new art installations at Eastern State Penitentiary include Jesse Krimes’s “Apokaluptein 16389067:II,” a one-of-a-kind iteration of an extraordinary contraband art piece crafted while he was incarcerated for almost six years in multiple federal prisons.

Eastern State’s art installation program has brought 95 different pieces to the historic prison in the last 20 years, director of interpretation Sean Kelley said at an April 30 preview of the artwork.

This season, the five new installations join seven existing installations. Krimes’s work, solidly paving the walls and ceiling of a cell in the late 19th-century Cell Block 8 is a special reproduction of his “Apokaluptein 16389067.” The original piece was created on 39 prison-issue bedsheets, using images from the New York Times transferred onto the fabric with hair gel and a plastic spoon, blended with colored pencils, and then surreptitiously mailed out of the prison one by one, as they were completed.

The piece’s name references the Greek root of the word “apocalypse”: uncovering, revealing, or bringing damage and destruction, and the number is Krimes’s Federal Bureau of Prisons ID.

The Lancaster native called the installation process “kind of extraordinary.” The current work is a reproduction of the original, but it was created in a similar way. Using hand sanitizer, Krimes transferred ink-jet printouts of his original imagery onto prison-issue sheets, which he pasted onto the walls of the cell with a special matte adhesive.

It took a month of 16-hour days to install, he said.

“It was such an intense experience that the entire piece is this singular entity,” communicating the limited experience inmates have of the outside world: Events and advertisements gleaned from the newspaper, he added of completing the installation. For more about his process and the meaning behind his work, visit his website.

No Trace Without Resistance

Another of this year’s featured artists, Ruth Scott Blackson, came to Philly a few years ago from her home in Durham, England. Her “No Trace Without Resistance” is 2,000 flakes of paint plied with genuine gold leaf and glued to the crumbling walls of a cell in Block Nine.

“This is one of the first places I visited when I came [to Philly],” she said. She called it a “lightbulb moment” in her artistic career. She applied to present a version of her current installation in 2013, but her first idea didn’t make the cut, because she proposed putting her gold onto the prison’s own flakes of paint.

“It has to be removable, and you need to leave the cell in the state you found it,” she explained.

Countless hours of experimentation in her basement yielded the successful solution: poured paint dried, then peeled up in curling fragments with a heat gun, then covered with a thin layer of gold leaf, then applied to the walls of the cell with special heat-gun-aided glue.

The finished project is less fragile than it looks, with the bits of gold adding an uncannily arresting flash to the existing patchwork of decades of peeling paint, eroding plaster, and the growing islands of the original schist exposed over the years in the cell walls, the rocks gleaming with silver mica.

“I’m fascinated with surfaces in general,” Blackson, who works by day in book restoration, said. The piece is meant to draw you in to thinking about the relationship between the person in the cell and the walls around him.

Songs, portraits, and plates

This year’s other new artists include Jess Perlitz, whose “Chorus” is a motion-activated sound installation of songs performed by incarcerated people. Eric Okdeh, partnering with the Mural Arts Program, brings four portrait panels of his “Beyond the Wall” series to the site’s baseball field. And Emily Waters developed a surreal offering of hand-painted porcelain plates featuring the top ten modern American prisons accused of human rights violations, according to reporting in Mother Jones. The project was inspired by a real 19th-century dessert plate featuring Eastern State.

The new art installations on view at Eastern State Penitentiary, 2027 Fairmount Avenue, Philadelphia, are included for the price of admission ($10-$14). The site is open every day from 10am to 5pm (last entry at 4pm).

At right: Ruth Scott Blackson poses next to a piece of "No Trace Without Resistance." Photo by Alaina Mabaso.