The Omega Suites.

Lucinda Devlin

Susanne Breidenbach, ed.

(Gottingen, Germany: Steidi Verlag, 2001)

The Omega Suites addresses the cessation of public execution in the United States by presenting images devoid of human presence. One of the most striking effects of Lucinda Devlin's photographs of execution chambers, witness rooms and final holding cells is the palpable absence of life; this of course implicates the purpose of the chambers: to take life away. The absence also speaks to the extreme level of remove with which current-day executions are enacted. Witness rooms are populated by a select few members of the public, most of whom have some personal connection to either the convicted person or to the victims of the crime committed. Thus, the function of capital punishment as a deterrent to criminal behavior is diluted by the public's inability to fully witness and experience the horror of execution. How, then, do these images of gas chambers, electric chairs and lethal injection tables, made widely available to the public, function politically? Although these photographs do not document the act of ritu alized killing, they do document the environments in which these rituals take place, and we are now privy to visually experiencing these rooms.

Several of the images are constructed from the point of view of an actual witness, framing one's vision through means of a window between the execution chamber and the witness room. The underwater feel of Lethal Injection Chamber, Statesville Correctional Center, Jollet, Illinois, 1991, with institutional aquamarine light washing over the rumpled white sheet on the table, is immediately followed by the view from the witness room, which draws the viewer out of the surrounding darkness and into the center of the frame where a smaller (more removed), less sickly (more sterile) version of the table perches, ready for the next incumbent. We, the public, then, may enter into the position of witness, with only one element missing: the inevitable execution. Although we do not witness this death, our certainty of its eventual, repeated occurrence does invest us with a different kind of knowledge: the ability to imagine, in the actual physical space, an actual human execution. Giving the details of location forces the occasion into the imagination.

With only a few exceptions, the restraining chair or gurney is always visible in, or the focus of, the photographs. Only one image in The Omega Suites focuses entirely on the witness room, so we can imagine witnessing the witnesses. Witness Room, Petosi Correctional Center, Petosi, Missouri, 1991 displays a side view of two tiers of gray and red plastic lawn chairs, set in alternating colors, facing a pair of windows with closed venetian blinds. Behind this witnessing stage is a door labeled "Out of Bounds"--a self-conscious concept prevalent throughout the entire viewing experience of The Omega Suites. The external position that most of the public occupies in relation to state executions allows us to escape the experience of horror and to presume that the viewing experience is devoid of self-implication. By presenting the places, by taking us out of bounds, these images disallow that escape.

EXHIBITION CATALOGS

Photographs at St. Lawrence University, by Catherine Tedford and Gary D. Sampson, ed. St. Lawrenece University/217 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Promise, by Lily Markiewicz. The University Gallery, Leeds/28 pp./price unavailable (sb).

Shirin Neshat: Two Installations, by Bill Horrigan. Wexner Center for the Arts/56 pp./$22.95 (Sb).

Unlimited Partnerships: Collaborations in Contemporary Art, Grant Kester, ed. CEPA Gallery/48 pp/price unavailable (sb).

Western Space+Time, by Gunnar Plake. Commonwealth Art Press/unpaginated/price unavailable (sb).