JESSE KRIMES

Jesse Krimes is an Philadelphia-based American artist and curator whose multidisciplinary work spotlights criminal injustice and contemporary perceptions of criminality. Krimes co-founded Right of Return USA, the first national fellowship dedicated to supporting formerly incarcerated artists. While serving a six-year prison sentence, Krimes produced and smuggled out multiple series of artwork, many of exploring how contemporary media shapes or reinforces societal mechanisms of power and control.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Purgatory is a series of 300 prison-issued soap remnants depicting "offenders" which Krimes produced during his year of solitary confinement. Using a hand-printing technique, Krimes transferred the New York Times portrait heads onto wet soap fragments, leaving inverse traces of the appropriated image. Krimes concealed and protected the printed soaps within playing card containers as he smuggled them through the prison mailing system over the duration of a year. To create the containers, he designed a makeshift tool from the interior connector of a AAA battery, cutting window-like structures into each card which were then adhered together using toothpaste.