Fraught Imaginaries (2022-2025)

Supply 🌀 Demand

Modular cinder block installation constructed from materials sourced through the prison-industrial supply chain
Dimensions variable
2025

Supply & Demand was presented in my solo exhibition, Fraught Imaginaries at Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn. Built in the shape of a walk-through spiral, the installation reconfigures the architectures of the Columbia Secure Center for Girls in Claverack, NY, while drawing from the visual lexicon of privatized, third-party commissary suppliers—companies that provide food, clothing, hygiene items, and other essentials to prisons through catalog and online ordering systems across the United States.

The spiral form is intentional: it mirrors the circular, self-perpetuating logic of the prison-industrial complex, where profit and punishment reinforce one another in a loop that is difficult to escape. At the same time, the spiral gestures toward an opposing symbolic tradition—the spiral as a form of renewal, evolution, and movement toward an emergent center. As viewers walk through the structure, they physically enact the tension between these two forces: the labyrinth of incarceration and the possibility of transformation.

Constructed from materials sourced directly from the prison supply chain, the installation transforms carceral commodities into an immersive spatial environment. Seen through frameworks of magical realism, fantasy, and game theory, the work distorts and recombines these objects to expose the absurd, extractive, and intentionally convoluted nature of the system it draws from. As viewers move through the spiral, the architecture itself begins to feel unstable—warping and dissolving as the system it represents is conceptually dismantled.

By reshaping these materials into a navigable form, Supply & Demand foregrounds both the psychic and structural labyrinths of incarceration while imagining their eventual unraveling.

Expulsion

Colored pencil on paper, aluminum tamperproof bulletin display case, 48 x 2 x 72 inches
2025

Expulsion is a colored pencil drawing derived from a hallway inside the living unit of the Columbia Secure Center for Girls. The hallway is mirrored and refracted four times, transforming the rigid architecture into a prismatic corridor through which the exterior landscape of the Hudson River Valley presses through. This intrusion of natural light and terrain disrupts the cold geometry of the interior, suggesting a world attempting to pierce the impermeable logic of confinement.

The drawing is installed inside an aluminum tamperproof display case—identical to those used throughout American prisons and many public educational institutions. These cases, designed to be locked, non-destructive, and inaccessible, reveal a shared institutional logic: architectures built to control visibility, regulate information, and maintain distance between the viewer and the content displayed. By mounting the work within such a case, Expulsion introduces a deliberate layer of separation, echoing the psychological and physical barriers that structure carceral and educational environments alike. The locked enclosure becomes both a metaphor and an architectural echo—invoking the idea of escape while simultaneously foreclosing it, mirroring the tensions between containment, longing, and transformation embedded in the drawing itself.

Tesseract

colored pencil on glassine, aluminum tamperproof bulletin display case
24” (L) x 2” (W) x 36” (H)
2024

Assembly

Assembly

Bob Barker plastic prison food trays coated in materials and images from the prison industrial supply chain.

Listed in order from the top down:

Tray 1: American Flag print on cotton, resin, bird poop
Tray 2: legal pad paper, Elmer’s glue, melted crayons
Tray 3: stickers, Elmer’s glue
Tray 4: toilet paper, Kool-Aide, Jolly Ranchers, Elmer’s glue
Tray 5: Hot Cheetos, Elmer’s glue Tray 6: religious fabric, resin
2024

Blind spot

etched blindspot mirror, marker
18” diamater
2024

Summer Sandpails

colored pencil, papier-mâché, kozo-shi paper over wood panel
14” (L) x 2” (W) x 11”(H)
2024

👁️ Spy

defunct security camera, resin, goggly eye, plushie fabric, Elmers glue
3.2” (L) x 3.2” (W) x 3.5”(H)
2024

Soapy

industrial soap dispenser, stickers, hd tv monitor, media player, electrical components
1 minute looping video
5.75” (L) x 5.25” (W) x 11.25”(H)
2023

Contraband Bag_2

clear bag, resin, contraband objects at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls
12”(L) x 9”(W) x 3”(H)
2021

Cinderblock_3

#2 pencils, Elmers school glue
16” (L) x 8” (W) x 8” (H)
2023

Real Metal Cuffs

paper mâché, kozo-shi paper, colored pencil
11”(L) x 5.25” (W) x 11”(H)
2023

First Keys

paper mâché, kozo-shi paper, colored pencil, shrink wrap
7”(L) x 1.5” (W) x 5”(H)
2024

Bubble Puddle

paper mâché, kozo-shi paper, colored pencil
8.7” (W) x 24.8” (H)
2023

Oh Yeah!?

paper mâché, kozo-shi paper, colored pencil
24oz bottle
2023

JL Marcus Commisary Catalog

paper mâché, kozo-shi paper, colored pencil
14.5”(L) x 17.5”(H)
2023

Cinderblock_2

cement, books, paper mâché, colored pencil
16” (L) x 8” (W) x 8” (H)
2023
(The books are recommended reading from the Columbia Collective.)

Contraband Bag_4

clear bag, resin, contraband objects at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls
13”(L) 14” (W) x 14” (H)
2023

Cinderblock_3

#2 pencils, Elmers school glue
16” (L) x 8” (W) x 8” (H)
2023

Contraband Bag_6

clear bag, resin, contraband objects at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls
7.5”(L) x 4”(W) x 8.5”(H)
2023

Contraband Bag_5

clear bag, resin, contraband objects at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls
18”(L) x 14”(W) x 6.75”(H)
2023

A View

graphite on paper
12” x 18”
2022

︎ The Columbia Collective Night Moth Documentary About ︎ Vimeo

copyright © 2026 Maggie Hazen