Galleries: Art in the cells of Eastern State Penitentiary

The stars must have been perfectly aligned the day that Eastern State Penitentiary took its annual leap of faith and committed to four artists' proposals for 2011, as well as one that will make its formal debut in 2012. Now realized, and occupying five former solitary-confinement cells, the installations by Greg Cowper, Jordan Griska, Michelle Handelman, Judith Schaechter, and Karen Schmidt have fully utilized their allotted spaces, as well as drawing on the atmosphere, architecture, and history of this unusual venue. (Schaechter's installation is her prototype for a series that will be completed in 2012.)

Walking into Cowper's Specimen, you'll imagine - undoubtedly for the first time - how an imprisoned 19th-century lepidopterist might have organized his cell. In fact, Cowper's installation was inspired by his discovery that Henry Skinner, a curator of the entomology department at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, actually met an inmate at Eastern State in 1889 who was a trained lepidopterist, and was astonished to see that he had collected 18 species of moths and butterflies in the yard outside his cell.

Cowper has retrofitted his cell space with old-fashioned display cases and a wooden flat file and filled them with jars, test tubes, and cigar-box arrangements of insects recently found (dead) on the premises by him and helpful ESP staff. Clearly, he is familiar with artist Mark Dion's fanciful re-creations of historic places and events, but as a real-life entomology curatorial assistant at the academy, he brings an encyclopedic knowledge, palpable enthusiasm, and wit to his project (I'm assuming his dead stinkbug viewed through a peephole in the flat file is a reference to Marcel Duchamp's Etant Donnes at the nearby Philadelphia Museum of Art).

In Separate System, Griska, a Philadelphia sculptor known for his found-object reinventions, has intensified the experience of imprisonment through his transposition of an entirely new cell within the dimensions of an original one, vastly increasing the space's innately claustrophobic quality. (He also jettisoned the bed and toilet to remove all personal touches.)

Formerly peeling and powdery, like all the other cells, and lit by a narrow, rectangular skylight, Griska's new hard-edged, geometric, sheet-steel interior looks as clinical and cold as a morgue.