Cell 150, B-Yard, HDSP   

Jo’an Dunn

9.5  x 13 X 17.5 in

Popsicle sticks, tongue depressors, soap, medicine pills, plastic bottle cap, athletic shorts, and floor wax

Cell 150 is an uncanny facsimile of the artist’s cell at High Desert State Prison, where the worst abuses of her time in prison regularly took place. From the psalms and signatures on the walls to the vent through which she could routinely hear her neighbors plotting attack, every detail of Jo’an’s work recreates the intimate landscape of her confinement. At once extraordinary and banal, every component of the piece’s structure and design is a testament to Jo’an’s visionary creativity and subversive ingenuity. 

From deconstructed parts of a broken reading light and discarded CD player, Jo’an wired Cell 150 to have a functional overhead light complete with wall switch. A bar of soap was carved and painted silver to create a toilet. A scrap of mesh shorts forms the vent. A Motrin cap becomes a desk chair, while emptied red and blue pill capsules become the hot and cold taps on the sink. The structure of Cell 150 is fabricated from tongue depressors and popsicles sticks which were gifted to Jo’an by Grace Hong at The Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) when the Covid pandemic sent prisoners at HDSP into permanent lock-down. 

Jo’an used floor wax as shellac to coat the outside of the cell with Critical Resistance’s Abolitionist Newspaper. The newspaper contextualizes Cell 150 – the human cage as well as its art object reproduction – as a material manifestation of Joan’s view from a space of captivity. Rather than confronting the cell from a seemingly impenetrable inside, Joan’s relationships of political solidarity moved her to create a transformed perspective – one from which she can see the other side of the walls.