No Seconds
with Amos Wells
(2024)

38 minutes

Four channel video with single channel sound and lavender body wash

Forgotten bones of
broken fathers etch the womb
of America

279 people are sitting on death row in Texas in a prison called the Polunsky unit. These individuals sentenced to death, a practice outlawed in 111 countries, have been stripped of their humanity. They await their fate for more than a decade in miserable conditions, lacking even the basic amenities of prisoners serving life sentences.

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.

Dewey-Hagborg and Wells met due to the circumstances of his case. He was sentenced to death, in part, on the basis of an argument that he would carry a gene predisposing him to violence. Dewey-Hagborg had made several artworks critiquing genomic over-reach in law enforcement and society at large.

No Seconds is part of a larger work-in-progress telling Amos Wells story, critiquing the death penalty, and bringing to light the ways contemporary genetics is being used as a tool for stereotyping, discrimination and neo-eugenic ideology in court rooms today.

Renderings by Scott Kepford. Audio and video editing by Heather Dewey-Hagborg.

Supported by Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and University City Science Center.

Installation view