Phrenology

2008

Phrenology investigates the perception of space though writings created by incarcerated women, presented visually through photography and video. The work was created with six women in a writing workshop that Crean facilitated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2007. Initially in their writing, participants mainly described spaces from their past, then slowly grew to metaphorically represent their present surroundings, and finally to image potential future environments. To accompany these texts, Crean photographed spaces that would serve as visual analogies to the writings, showing them at the request of the women to facilitate the their will to access the outside world that had been otherwise denied to them.

The work is presented through 4 elements: Spatial images with their related text, video, and the workshop curriculum. Photographs from each space were composited into fragmented, two dimensional, cubist style panorama, presented alongside each woman’s texts that inspired them. A12 minute single channel video features the camera floating through the different environments, sequenced chronologically according to the age of the persona in the text. Video of each space is accompanied by the voice of each woman reading their writing, complemented by an atmospheric sound track composed by Paul Geluso. The workshop curriculum, itself a poetic set of prompts created by several women - Crean, guest instructors and the participants - is presented along side audio-visual material to provide another means of understanding the nature of voice, collaboration and process involved in the project.

Phrenology was a Victorian pseudo-science of the brain, which claimed to map one’s personality according to the topography of their skull. If the psyche could be charted physically, then its alteration after a period of emotional stress could also be seen as the erosion of a physical landscape.

The project was supported by a 2007 harvestworks.org residency and 2007 rhizome.org commission.