System Structures

System Structures is a multidisciplinary exhibition by Emmanuel Massillon that explores the frameworks of control embedded within everyday life. Through a series of sculptures, text-based works, installations, video, and sound, the exhibition investigates how social institutions shape, restrict, and define the lives of individuals, particularly those from marginalized communities. Rather than focusing on one single system, Massillon draws attention to a range of institutions that often operate together in ways that are both visible and invisible. These include religion, the prison industrial complex, the academic system, the workplace, financial institutions, pharmaceutical companies, law enforcement, the legal system, and the entertainment industry. Each of these institutions plays a role in determining who has access to power, who is disciplined, and who is seen and heard.

The exhibition features several new bodies of work that expand on Massillon’s material language and conceptual focus. A new series of text paintings explores poetry and conceptual thought through the use of typography, combining language from hip-hop lyrics, pharmaceutical drug warnings, and political speeches. These works ask viewers to consider how language reinforces authority while also offering moments of resistance and cultural affirmation. Another group of text-based works are made from prison soap, beeswax, and concrete, and feature Arabic writing that references Islam’s complicated role in the American prison system. These works reflect Massillon’s ongoing research into how Black men in prison have turned to Islam as both a structure for survival and a means of spiritual resistance.

In one installation, a preacher’s podium is suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, while the preacher’s belongings such as notes, shoes, a robe, and personal items are scattered across the floor. This work questions the role of religious leadership and spectacle and invites viewers to consider how spiritual authority is constructed and maintained. Another installation presents a mailbox bursting through the gallery wall, stuffed with homeownership advertisements, government mailers, and gentrification propaganda. Here, Massillon addresses the subtle violence of displacement and the way opportunity is often used to mask systemic erasure.

The exhibition also includes a large immersive installation using Arabic prayer books, plaster, and floating sculptural heads positioned above prayer rugs. This environment deepens the conversation around spirituality and mass incarceration, invoking both the discipline and psychological escape that religion offers to the incarcerated. A selection of video works and soundscapes are projected onto the gallery walls, creating arhythmic pulse throughout the exhibition. These include manipulated sermons, courtroom recordings, snippets of corporate audio, and ambient noise from urban life, creating an immersive sonic experience that reflects the tension and noise of institutional control.

System Structures ultimately invites viewers to examine the systems they move through every day. It asks how institutions shape our bodies, our language, our belief systems, and our choices. Through layered materials, evocative objects, and thoughtful research, Massillon transforms the gallery into a space of confrontation and reflection, offering not just critique but a call to reimagine the structures that govern our lives.