Moments of resistance are collapsed and woven together; from documentation of the Indigenous led occupation of Alcatraz, to the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of the ancestors, to one’s reflections on their body as they exist in the world today, these are gestures that meditate on the carceral inception and nature of the reservation system, and where sovereignty and belligerence intersect and diverge.

Sound by Courtney Asztalos
Music by Room Thirteen

Commissioned by the San Jose Museum of Art and the Institute of Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.

I drove around the U.S. filming these super maximum-security prison buildings the spring and summer after the World Trade Center bombing. I knew that counties within various states had been frantically outbidding each other to get these high-tech gulags to replace the farming and manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the last 25 years. The timing seemed right to remind everyone what we have been doing with our public funding and to draw parallels with the neo-liberal economic policies espoused with variations by the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations.

Clarke works with four men (Paul, Solomon, Eli, and Leslie) making masks for their video image. The video was made through the Arts in Corrections program at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California.

The result of a three-year project with inmates from a high security prison in Romania, Wings for Dogs is an essay about language and its capacity to simultaneously communicate and hide issues connected to guilt and responsibility.