Tehachapi, The Road

Years after the previous installations The Yard and Mountain, a new anamorphosis was installed on a housing unit by Tehachapi’s incarcerated population. The Road shows a mountain range split by an open highway. The highway pushes the viewer’s eye into the distance, making them look forward and travel away. Easels sit on the sides of the road and the windows on the wall serve as the canvases; when someone looks out of one of the windows, they themselves become a work of art.

The Road is JR’s first ever pasting that involves color; above the black and white mountainscape, the sky is bright blue. The installation flawlessly melds with the open sky, echoing the sense of limitlessness conjured by the endless road. 

In reflecting on the installation, one incarcerated participant named Jeremey Morgan shared a story: “One of the guys here asked, ‘What’s that road supposed to be?’ and I guessed out loud that ‘it’s the road out of here.’ For me, that image and this experience is a source of encouragement for me to work towards getting out of here and one day traveling down that road as a free man.”

In the years after the first two Tehachapi installations, many of the original participants moved down a level of security from Facility B to Facility C in part due to the good behavior exhibited when creating the pastings. Seeing the value of collaborative art within Tehachapi, both the prison staff and JR were eager to create another project that involved the entire incarcerated population, all six hundred men living in Facility C. The Road is part of three installations created inside Tehachapi in April 2022.

Before installing The Road, JR and his team organized an Inside Out Photobooth Action in which 424 people were able to take their picture in the Photobooth truck and see their image print out as a larger-than-life portrait. Following The Road, JR and his team organized a picnic with all the people housed in Facility C.