Sex and death are an eternal couple. Lucinda Devlin has dogged the pair across America, shooting 30-by-30-inch color photos of themed luxury suites and execution chambers. In a Minneapolis hotel's "Northern Lights" room, guests are greeted by a furry polar bear rug and two plushie penguins beckoning from atop a massive round bed; not penguins but a thinly padded gurney crisscrossed with slack leather straps in the lethal-injection chamber awaits a prone body in a Parchman, Mississippi, penitentiary. Other dissonant juxtapositions include a private isolation tank in Syracuse, its step stained with salt from the warm water inside, and the bulbous steel door fronting the Arizona State Prison's gas chamber, which is covered with valves and rubber seals like a diving bell. Boise's condemned meet their maker on a broad bench in a wood-paneled, low-ceilinged room, with orange carpeting right out of a suburban den; surprisingly, the empty weightlifting benches in the windowless Kelly Lynne Figure Salon are similarly shot... More >>>