ATTICA SERIES DESK
CAMERON ROWLAND, 2016
You've used this desk. Not this exact one. But this desk. The shape, the weight, the color that's not really a color — it's more like a decision to stop thinking about color. You've sat at this desk in a waiting room or a government office or a school that ran out of budget two administrations ago. You never once wondered who made it. An incarcerated person at Attica made it. That's not metaphor. That's inventory. Attica Correctional Facility runs a furniture program. Has for decades. The workers are paid pennies — sometimes literally — to build desks, chairs, tables. The products get sold to state agencies at below-market rates. The agencies get a deal. The prison gets labor. The person doing the work gets a time slot that isn't a cell. Nothing about the desk looks wrong. That's the point. It's solid. Functional. If this were in a catalog, you'd say, "Yeah, that'll do." You'd never know. The violence isn't in the object. It's in the paperwork behind the object. Rowland doesn't alter the desk. Doesn't scratch it up, doesn't paint it, doesn't make it expressive. He just moves it. From prison to museum. Same desk. Wildly different context. In the prison system, this object is worth about forty dollars. In here, it's protected. Insured. Respected. The gap between those two valuations — that's the piece. And Rowland won't sell it to you. The works in this series are leased, not purchased. You can borrow the desk. You can display it. You cannot own it. Because ownership is the problem he's showing you. So here's a desk. In a museum. Looking exactly like it did in a prison. And the only thing that changed is who's paying attention.