Brushy Mountain Faces

Brushy Mountain Faces explores pareidolia, the human tendency to see faces in inanimate objects. The whimsical expressions of the sinks take a sinister turn once their setting in the harsh environment of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, is revealed. Brushy Mountain was created after the strikes and lockouts of the Coal Creek War in 1891 led to a ban on unpaid convict labor in private mines in Tennessee. The solution was to build a state run prison with its own coal mine. Brushy Mountain was open from 1896 to 2009. It could hold up to 584 prisoners and was a maximum security prison up to the 1980s. After a strike by prison guards over unsafe working conditions in 1972 it was also the only unionized prison in Tennessee. James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King, escaped for only 58 hours before being found not far away in the mountainous terrain in 1977.

Brushy Mountain is now a tourist destination.