In the piece No Seconds artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Amos Wells, a prisoner of the Polunsky unit, envision a future where we have progressed beyond the death penalty. No Seconds stands as an edifice of ideas showing our past inhumanity, a marker of the days when execution was still utilized as a method of vengeance in the legal system. No Seconds is the world’s first museum memorializing the death penalty and sharing the experience of prisoners who awaited execution on death row. No Seconds is based on months of phone calls between Dewey-Hagborg and Wells. The viewer can see the Polunsky unit as it stands today, including both the spaces visitors can view, and the spaces visible only to prisoners and guards. The prison has been reconstructed with 3d modeling to show these normally invisible spaces, as you hear Wells describe them, in a way that captures the feeling of being there as well as the architecture of incarceration. The model launches the current prison into a speculative future where it has been transformed into a museum and conveys both artists’ vision of how this site would look and feel when it was no longer used to hold people captive, but rather to remind us of our cruel past.
