Final Meal

The Phatory is pleased to announce Final Meal, a mixed media installation concerning capital punishment by Swedish artist Lennart Grebelius. The exhibit opens on March 18 and runs through April 9. An artist's reception will be held on March 18, from 7 - 9:00 P.M.

Final Meal examines capital punishment less through issues of justice, legitimacy, or retribution than through the lens of its mundane, yet telling details. Focusing specifically on John Michael Lamb, who was executed in Texas in 1999, it effectively uses the limited space of the gallery as a substitute for the cells in which Lamb and other prisoner's spent their last days. Enlargements of his mug shot, one conventional and one solarized surround a schedule of the prisoner's last day's activity and projected onto the back wall are menus of the last meals requested by him and 600 other executed prisoners. The viewer can also leaf through a large book, bound in black, containing the menus and a similar book, bound in white and placed in the floor, containing remarks by supporters of the death penalty. Less polemical than meditative, Grebelius' installation brings the viewer into a space defined by the daily realities of legalized death and establishes in that space the possibility of reflection.

Lennart Grebelius lives in Gothenburg, Sweden and has long been involved with conceptually-based work that explores socio-political issues on the one hand and mathematical structures on the other.