Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. In collaboration with George Mason University’s data mapping and art history scholars, Gaspar will continue to realize her goals of abolishing carceral spaces by adding prints of current prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities in Virginia to the Disappearance Jails project, which will ultimately be obscured through perforations by exhibition visitors.
The Innocents is a social justice advocacy performance art piece by musicians and composers Allen Otte and John Lane. Using a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts, the one-hour dramatic soundscape will explore various aspects of the issues surrounding the American criminal justice system.
John Lane is an artist whose creative work and collaborations extend through percussion to poetry/ spoken word and theater. As a performer, he has appeared on stages throughout the Americas, Australia, and Japan. As an advocate of social justice he co-created with Allen Otte The Innocents which the duo has performed throughout the US, including appearances at the Innocence Network Conference, Woody Guthrie Center, and Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights. He has recorded two albums: The Landscape Scrolls (Starkland Records, 2018), TRIGGER: Artists Respond to Gun Violence (Albany Records, 2021). John is the Professor of Percussion at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. www.john-lane.com
Allen Otte was a cofounder of the Blackearth Percussion Group and of Percussion Group Cincinnati, and toured for decades throughout the world performing new and experimental music created for him and his colleagues. Otte regularly presents his own creative work, often in residencies centered around the theme of performing social justice, and is the regular percussionist with the early music quartet Trobar Medieval. He is professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati, and in 2017 was inducted into the International Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
Program Note: This approximately one hour dramatic soundscape is comprised of seventeen individual tableaus which endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, psychology, politics, injustice, and resilience. Though we do this from our admittedly privileged perspective, we have available not only the information – both factual and testimonial – but, significantly, we have resources of a time and sound-based art. In performance we have the opportunity to direct and focus not only attention, but more importantly, to engage on an emotional level where experience is more than simply processing facts and figures.
Questions should be emailed to Alissa Maru at amaru@gmu.edu
