Sean Berg is a thirty year old Cedar Valley based artist that uses an assortment of mediums, including pastels, markers, paints, pens, resins, and collage. His recent work has focused on layering non-traditional mediums.
Artist Statement
As I began making artwork, I knew that I wanted to use it to speak out on modern mass-incarceration. I focused on how the experience of being incarcerated contrasts with the common image we see propagated throughout American forms of media and news. Simultaneously, and more importantly, I also focused on the after effects of prison, institutionalization, and the arrested development that often occurs because of these extended stays inside modern prisons. Released felons are frequently deemed less than by outsiders of the prison system, many civilians not only believing, but also adding to, the stigmatization of those who have spent time within prison. These same people who are quick to judge often pass on beliefs that felons deserve what they have been given, and the lack of respect, the lack of jobs, and the lack of support the modern American felon finds once released is not only part of a system of necessity, but also fair, just, and even deserved.
Amongst these very ideas, I ran into an unexpected wall. Conveying my lived experiences and research on a subject few had experience with proved far more difficult than I had earlier imagined. So, in turn, I quickly found that speaking about prison became much easier to digest when done as a form of satire. This led me to embrace a view arrested in development, one that could more simply and honestly address the monster that is over-incarceration, playing off the arrested development that prisons frequently instill into people who have spent too much time behind unforgiving concrete walls. I combined this honest simplicity with my lived experiences, the language and imagery that I often heard and saw while incarcerated. This allowed me power enough to begin combating systems that previously felt untouchable to me during 3 1/2 years of Iowa incarceration.
The process of creating this exhibition led me to think on how I could talk about prisons without people seeing the content as disconnected or beneath themselves, a large portion of modern Americans finding prisons and their partakers as quite distasteful, if not completely taboo. The problem arises in many living as if mass-incarceration is unrelated enough to their own existence that they feel comfortably ignoring prisons and over-policing almost all together, even when they breed problems directly into their own communities. I agitate this problem by embracing the imagery of prison, as well as the raw language and thought of an inmate, one who has spent time in the Iowa prison machine. Choice of ‘low’ materials, ones accessible in prison, were one way of highlighting these issues consistently, as well as labor intensity and repetition, both things common to a prisoner.
While thinking on this problem, I also became very involved with a new group of people that were very concerned with oppressed people within the United States. They had similar experiences as I, many far worse, and I found that they had an inherent truthful understanding of my work that I had not encountered very often in other people’s viewings. It would be through those experiences within these active social groups, as well as online and in person interactions with local activists and leaders, that my art began to take on its true form, one that sought to reveal the systematic oppression from within the United States towards anyone not white enough or anyone unlucky enough to be struck as a felon arrested and convicted under American law. I quickly discovered that the struggle to speak after being caged, after having your voice taken from you by force, was not just my unique struggle but a massive ever-spreading problem cutting straight through the whole incarceration system. It was not unique, and not only was it not unique… it was plain common. This is why my art now moves more and more towards simply shining light on the people, places, and things that often go unseen and unheard.
With these ideas in mind, it is important to note that there is so much to say on this subject that I personally feel like I could write a series of letters and still not get the words quite right. Regardless, this show ruminates on what it means to be seen as not quite capable or inherently wrong, how it feels to be treated as that decision-less incapable child, and how we turn that into its own form of mutual understanding across all intersections of people who have experienced similar strife or oppression.
We are living in a constant state of arrest, and it is time to set ourselves free.
