Beyond Borders: Stories of im/Migration
Online Gallery
Santa Clara University, Edward M. Dowd Art and Art History Building Gallery
January 8, 2018 to April 6, 2018, Monday - Friday, 9am-4pm
EXHIBITION DETAILS ONLINE CATALOG PRINT CATALOG STORIES BLOG
Tessie Barrera-Scharaga
San Jose, California
San Jose, California
Cartography of Longing
Mixed Media Assemblage incorporating painting, paper, and found objects, 2013 Home for me has always been a hard spot to pinpoint. My parents were both foreign students from South and Central America when they met in the U.S. Falling in love, and subsequently marrying, put our family on multiple trajectories throughout the American continent. Though I was born in New York, I zigzagged between countries and cities many times over while growing up. Arriving at each new destination meant having to adjust to a different setting, people, ways of doing things, and manners of speaking. It required a lot of explaining, beginning with who I was and where I came from. As a child I attended five different elementary schools. My experience of being the foreigner was repeated many times over as I advanced through each grade. At some point I realized that I had a talent for memorizing songs and poems, and that this got me into each of my new teacher’s good graces. Though I was extremely shy and introverted, I became the child who always volunteered to sing or recite at school events. This body of work acts as a journal from that particular time in my life. Each painting alludes to a region of the continent where my family lived and traveled. The lyrics of children’s songs delineate the journeys taken. Though these experiences left me with an expansive concept of home as we moved from one country to another, I continually longed for people, places, and things that were very dear to me, and that were by force, left behind. |
Carlos Cartagena
San Francisco
San Francisco
Estatuas de Sal (Pillars of Salt)
Mixed Media on Canvas, 72 x 36 inches each Esta nueva serie, la cual es parte de Siluetas, invita a revisar aquella historia donde unos emisarios llevan el anuncio sobre la destrucción de un par de ciudades. La oportunidad de salvarse de esa destrucción no era para todos los habitantes. Aquellos que se salvarían del castigo colectivo tendrían que renunciar a su tierra, a sus amigos, a sus amaneceres. Para salvarse habrá que dejarlo todo, habrá que arrancarse a uno mismo de cuajo, habrá que rescatar de las pertenecías, solo lo que quepa en las manos. El caos y la anarquía, los vicios y la barbarie, acaso todo esto inducido, fue razón y pretexto para la demolición con fuego y azufre. Para evitar ser parte de este castigo habrá que emigrar sin preguntarse qué futuro te depara. Habrá que mirar solamente hacia adelante y romperte el cordón umbilical. Corre, sálvate, pero que no se te ocurra mirar hacia atrás. Estas siluetas han sido tomadas de niños migrantes y refugiados. **** This new series is part of the Silhouettes project, a traveling exhibition of wooden human-shaped figures covered with true stories of migrant people, including photos, documents, poems and original letters. The diptych Estatuas de Sal is created using images of migrant refugee children and coated in a salt solution. It invites us to take a different perspective on that ancient biblical story in which emissaries announce the impending destruction of two cities. Not all the inhabitants have the opportunity to save themselves from this doom. Those who will escape the collective punishment must renounce their land, their friends, their sunrises. In order to rescue themselves, they have to leave everything behind, to uproot themselves and take with them only those belongings that can fit in their hands. Inhospitality, sin and barbarism, chaos and anarchy – these were the reasons and pretext for the destruction by fire and brimstone. To avoid this fate, you must emigrate without asking what future awaits you. You must look only forward and tear off your umbilical cord. Run, escape, save yourself! But don’t ever allow yourself to look back. |
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Aùn te extraño
Photo-Documentation of Bas-Relief, Variable Public Exclamations of Love, is an intervention project in public spaces. It consists of phrases written on concrete walls or walls of earth on the side of the roads. I appeal to the text as form and content of the piece, the message of the phrases refer to moments of reflection and personal experiences of separation and death. Aún te extraño (I still miss you) is the first piece of the project, with calligraphic features on large format directly carved in bas-relief on the slope of land, which is visible in the distance. It is aside of the road leading to Tacuba Ahuachapán, Km 8.5, El Salvador. |
Kathryn Clark
San Francisco
San Francisco
Shelter Structure (Al Zaatari Refugee Camp)
Hand embroidery and watercolor on Tyvek and cotton organdy, 59 X 46 inches, 2016 By Land Hand embroidery on cotton organdy,, 58 X 60 inches, 2017 New Home Hand embroidery and watercolor on cotton organdy, 56 x 56 inches, 2017 REFUGEE STORIES Inspired by the historical storyboard of the Bayeux Tapestry, Refugee Stories is a series of embroidery panels that follow the journey of the Syrian refugees into Europe. The monumental scale of the crisis, the second largest mass migration in history, is documented in various points along the refugees’ journey out of Syria and into Western Europe. Each point along their journey was affected by geography: whether by sea or land, pastoral farmland or war torn desert. Using international news stories, Google Earth, and numerical data from the United Nations, each panel pieces together the journey in one schematic map. |
Judy Gelles
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
All Alone
USA: Pennsylvania, Public School Photograph with Text 2008 25 x 20 inches Feel Lucky USA: Pennsylvania, Private Quaker School Photograph with Text 2010 25 x 20 inches Of Bees USA: Washington, Native American Public School Photograph with Text 2016 25 x 20 inches The Rent USA: California, Public School Photograph with Text 2012 25 x 20 inches To Eat China: School for Migrant Workers Children Photograph with Text 2010 25 x 20 inches Fourth Grade Project: Over the past nine years Judy Gelles has interviewed and photographed more than 300 fourth grade students from a wide range of economic and cultural backgrounds in China, England, India, Israel, Italy, Nicaragua, St. Lucia, South Africa, South Korea, and multiple areas of the United States. She asked all of the students the same three questions: Who do you live with? What do you wish for? What do you worry about? Told in their own words, their stories touch on common human experiences and urgent social issues. |
Taraneh Hemami
San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California
Absence; from the Hall of Reflections Series
Acrylic Box print, 6 x 9 inches each, 2016 Bodies, individually or in groups, are cutout from collected family photographs. What remains are fragments of place; intimate: a backyard, a living room, a bed, a dining table- or in public: a classroom, a bridge, a brick road- that evoke a sense of longing. Absent from captured moments of celebrations or identification portraits, these silhouettes of the invisible hover over the spaces they once occupied, tracing the outlines of their remembrances within layers of time, stranding together new narratives of belonging. Hall of Reflections is a multi-dimensional art project that chronicles the complex migrant experiences of men and women of the Iranian Diaspora in Northern California through site-specific and web-based installations. Drawing on Persian and Islamic designs and structures, Hall of Reflections creates a unique archive of personal photographs and narratives to explore themes of loss, preservation, displacement and belonging, specific to the historical experience of Iranian immigrants. |
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Diane Kahlo
Lexington, Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky
Crossings/Travesías
Installation, Variable, 2011 Diane brings together several mediums and approaches to “art-making” to create two installations that talk about the loss of life while people are attempting to migrate to an area where the possibility of finding work in order to feed their families. In both works, the embellished skeletons and skulls are lamented over by the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. |
Sana Krusoe
Springfield, Oregon
Springfield, Oregon
border crossing: coronado/nogales
Mixed Media, 12 x 3 inches point reyes/homer Mixed Media, 12 x 3 inches These two pieces are from a series entitled “migration,” an extended body of work done between 2006 and 2009. The series is based on the migratory patterns of birds, caribou, and humans, and on the imprinting that is part of navigation and the recognition of home. I have used the avian body as witness and site of record. The majority of the series focused on the global patterns of bird migration, using the beginning and end points of the journey as interchangeable destinations. However, two pieces focus on the migration of legal and illegal immigrants in the western United States. In border crossing: coronado/nogales the movement of people across the US/Mexican border and the subsequent scattering are marked across the map with insect specimen pins. In point reyes/homer urban centers and small agricultural communities that are the sites of seasonal worker migration are mapped out along the west coast as a webbing of lines and dots, journeys and arrivals. In both cases the network of trails and passages is a known yet invisible overlay , a connectivity that maps a culture on the move. This work explores the imbedded systems of navigation that imprint themselves sequentially and over generations, as well as the notion of home as particularity and safe harbor. Yearly migrations among humans are similarly arduous: the desert yields its dead monthly along the border crossings. Though the jouneys are perilous, they also serve survival, offering sanctuary, allowing vulnerability without penalty, producing life, producing hope. The drive to reach home or to return to more benign territory is both urgent and sublime. Next to this urgency on the edge, life is implacable, impersonal, piercingly sweet, unutterably beautiful. |
The Jailer: Part 2
Video, 3:45, 2013 Many artists use their art to express their convictions. In May 2011, Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Erin McKeown, and nine other artists, visited Nogales as part of a musician activist retreat set up by Air Traffic Control. The border town, which straddles Arizona and Mexico, is an ideal place to witness the controversy over immigration and the strain felt by individuals on all different sides. During her trip, McKeown was able to witness the "rapidly shifting immigration debate, and explore the links between immigration, media justice, and criminal justice issues." The musician debuted "The Jailer" on her self-released album Manifesto. The politically charged track was inspired by truths she experienced during her time in Nogales. "I took a trip to Nogales, Arizona to see the wall being built between the U.S. and Mexico." she said. "I was struck by how it appeared to be a violent spine rising out of the beautiful desert {...} This got me thinking about the toll a wall takes on the hearts of those it divides and on the soul of the builder of the wall." More recently, Stephen Brackett (Flobots) and Shawn King (DeVotchKa) remixed McKeown's "The Jailer" to produce "The Jailer: Part 2." Through this release, the trio hopes to engage listeners by educating them on relevant issues of today. (from Dee Wallace, The Spec, October 4, 2013) |
Delilah Montoya
Houston, Texas
Houston, Texas
Road to Aztlan
Photograph Migrant Campsite Photograph Humane Borders Water Station Photograph Sed: The Trail of Thirst, produced in collaboration with Orlando Lara, exhibited at Talento Bilingüe de Houston for FotoFest 2004, and funded by University of Houston Small Grants Program, engages the tropes of the Southwestern landscape. However, rather than focusing on human interaction with landmarks and locales, this project wields its expressive power by focusing on the absence of the human figure in the landscape. This installation depicts the perilous migration route across the Arizona Sonora desert and the omnipresent thirst for water experienced by migrants during their clandestine border crossings. The installation includes panoramic photographs documenting the desert landscape, digital photographic prints, found objects, and a video of the trail that crosses the Sonora Desert from northern Mexico into Arizona and the Tohono O’odham Nation. Displayed on shelves in front of the photographs is a collection of objects left behind on the journey, including the mismatched shoes of adults and children and religious votive items – touchstones for spiritual sustenance and safeguards for a safe journey. This cultural landscape represents “a contemporary middle passage,” where between 1996 and 2004, more than 3,000 migrants perished along the border. Sed: The Trail of Thirst honors the courage of the migrant experience and those who have sought to provide the migrants with aid by establishing the controversial mini-oases scattered throughout the region. Both W. Jackson Rushing in Art Papers, July/August 2004 and Patricia C. Johnson in “Gallery Notes,” in the Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2004, reviewed this installation. |
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Julio Cesar Morales
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe, Arizona
Boy in Suitcase
HD Video Animation, 3:33, 2015 Boy in Suitcase is a video about an eight-year-old boy's journey from the Ivory Coast that was recently smuggled to Spain via Morocco in a suitcase. The father who lives in Spain was trying to reunite with his son. The animation video attempts to create visuals from the boy's perspective of what he might have seen through a small zipper and tiny holes in the suitcase that features some kind of spiral hallucinations and a bewildering type of colors and sounds. The animation is produced from a single x-ray image taken by Spanish custom officials and then colors as sampled and animated to produce the moving image. |
Gala Narezo, Shamina de Gonzaga and Chantal Fischzang
New York City and Newark, New Jersey
New York City and Newark, New Jersey
MEXUS
Posters and printed brochures MEXUS is a mixed media series created in collaboration by Gala Narezo, Shamina de Gonzaga and Chantal Fischzang documenting Mexico/US migration stories in Mexico and the US since 2009. The goal of MEXUS is to provide a dimensional and authentic insight into the diverse Mexican experience in the United States. Intending to challenge the preconceptions and the reductive perception propagated by media, we cast a positive, more human light on people’s struggles and their sentiment of their time here. Our intent is to bring some genuine, layered, personal narratives to generate empathy and prompt public response to eventually affect policy. Our approach is to superimpose media dissemination with personal narratives to counter how the stories of Mexico, the drugs wars and the phenomenon of migration were being told in the media. The work prompts viewers to stand in-between a contradiction of type and image in order to create a commentary about people’s realities vs the discrepancies of political regulations. |
Daniela Ortiz
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona, Spain
FDTD ( Forcible Drugging to Deport / Sedación Forzada para Deportar)
Video, 5:56 Peru 1985 The video shows the moment when i received a dose of a sedating drug for the reading the Free Trade Agreement signed by the Peruvian and the North American governments. Previous to this, i give information about the number of Peruvians deported from the United States as well as information about the practice of forced sedation during deportations carried on by the Immigration and Custom Enforcement Agency of the United States of America. |
Priscilla Otani
San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California
Our Hearts Beat As One
Installation, 2.5' H x 3' Diameter x 5 pieces, 2015-2017 This work was inspired by the extraordinary migration of Monarch butterflies and the parallels it draws to human migration. Once free-spirited and solitary, individuals gather on a certain day in two’s and three’s and in ever increasing numbers. Strangers, now companions, they travel together over a vast distance to escape certain death. Their only goal is survival and to bring the next generation forward. Entire generations die during this long migration but the will to reach a destination is borne by the next generations. Once arrived, tattered and weary Monarchs cluster together in the canopy of sheltering trees. “Our Hearts Beat As One” represents the shared desire of migrants for survival and regeneration. The paper umbrella represents a fragile shelter, a destination reached, though not as secure as expected. The inside spokes provide a narrow perch where the travelers cluster to stay warm. The fallen leaves beneath the umbrella offer both sustenance and a burial ground. The wings falling from the umbrella convey tears at the fleetingness of life. |
Judith Quax
Netherlands
Netherlands
Washed Up Clothing
Photographs/Video Slideshow Since 2006 I have been researching and photographing migration from West Africa to Europe. The people I meet bring me in touch with other people, sometimes on the other side of the Ocean and vice versa. The lives of the migrants I have met through the years are multi-layered and often intertwined. One story unfolds into another. For many migrants and their families ‘Presence in Absence’ is a reality: families are separated for many years and, as a result of undocumented status, are often not capable of traveling back. Walking at the beach of Yoff, a small fishing village in Dakar, I noticed that there were lots of washed up clothing. Watching the waves playing with the clothes, I was wondering about what happened to the people who wore them. When I was living in Yoff, and talked to the locals about immigration, I heard many stories of young fishermen that were desperate and risked their lives to reach Europe by small fishing boats. |
Zahava Sherez
Oakland, California
Oakland, California
Those People Are Us
Clay. 144 x 72 x 42 inches, 2006-2015 Human race’s history is filled with nomads, migrants, and refugees. In our bloodlines we can find the strong and courageous ones who fled persecutions to ensure our survival, the ones who fought for our rights to be, as equals. When refugees are called ‘them’ we detach and distant ourselves from their struggles and inhuman conditions. The refugees of today were us, or our ancestors, in the not so distant past. Let’s respect each other, stay connected, involved, and pledge justice for all. |
Sin Huella Collective (Delilah Montoya et.al)
Texas and Mexico
Texas and Mexico
Detention Nation
Design by Jesus Gonzales Montage of Stories on Wallpaper 8’ x 8' "Detention Nation . . . puts a spotlight on what many consider to be an inhumane immigration policy: Each day, thousands of people are detained — and treated like criminals — for the act of crossing a political line. The walls display letters from previous detainees, who describe their frustration. “Detainee Name is suppose (sic) to be el nombre del detenidonot nombre del delincuente,” says one, protesting a form’s incorrect translation. Detenido means detained. Delincuente means criminal. . . Passed in 2009, the [federal] mandate requires that all detention facilities nationwide fill every bed, every night. That means 34,000 people are kept locked up each day, many for acts like speeding or driving without proof of insurance. The facility in Aurora is tasked with filling each of its 525 beds. Plenty of people argue that the detention system is necessary to ensure deportations, and some urge even stricter enforcement. But immigration rights activists say detaining people based on an arbitrary quota is unconscionable. Also unconscionable, they say, is that the majority of detention facilities are privately owned and operated. The GEO Group, which owns the Aurora facility and is the second largest for-profit prison operator in the U.S., doubled the number of facilities it operates after the quota was passed. Its net income in 2011 was more than $70 million." - Colorado Independent article by Kelsey Ray February 13, 2016 |
Doerte Weber
San Antonio, Texas
San Antonio, Texas
Checkpoint Carlos
3 panels, 8 x 4 feet each When the border wall between the US and Mexico was built, memories of my home country’s border division (Germany 1961-1989) surfaced. Checkpoint Carlos forms 10 passageways—woven plastic bags from newspaper given to me by a vast number of people in San Antonio, TX. They symbolized our common humanity, support for human rights and immigration reform. |
Shannon Wright
San Jose, California
San Jose, California
Feral Fence
Galvanized and zinc-plated steel, chain link fencing, barbed wire Variable, 2007 Modernist utopias-turned-dystopias (the built and the never-built) have long fascinated me. In several of my pieces from the past twenty years I have aimed to create the impression of simplistic, institutionally-issued "solutions" to contemporary problems. In some cases, I intend for these solutions to now appear to be relics or ruins–poorly-conceived projects, now abandoned. With the piece called Feral Fence (2007) I hoped to suggest that this ubiquitous separator of public space and private property had been neglected–and had perhaps been irrelevant–for so long that it had reverted to a "state of nature." From 2007 to 2008 the 12-foot-tall, 80-foot-long fence was exhibited along the edge of a quarry in Vermont. In 2007 artist and critic Marc Awodey wrote, "California artist Shannon Wright’s “Feral Fence” is a 10-foot-tall chain-link fence made of pristine, gleaming steel... A jumble of Y-shaped barbed-wire fence-post caps are woven with three strands of prickly wire, as if to suggest the old quarry is a treasure not be trespassed on. Of course, it’s an absurd fence, and possibly a wry critique of some of the border schemes currently being discussed in Washington, D.C." Ten years later, such a "border scheme"–a grotesque symbol of hubris and myopia–is on the brink of realization in the U.S. In this political climate Feral Fence offers a vision of a kind of "magical thinking," of a natural, gradual unraveling of an act of human aggression. |
Yu-Wen Wu
Boston, Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts
Migration-On Yellow Brick Road
Video, 4:30, 2013 Migration: the physical movement from one place to another, sometimes over long distances, singularly or in large groups usually due to hardships-- famine, persecution, war or economic necessity. Rarely does one want to leave family, friends or homeland for the unknown and oftentimes perilous new beginnings. Nearly two centuries ago Chinese immigrants came to America drawn to the California Gold Rush. Gold Mountain was initially named for California and in particular San Francisco where the immigrants disembarked, bound for the gold fields. These immigrants labored under extraordinarily harsh conditions, faced terrible discrimination, and many were murdered. From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Center of San Francisco served as the processing center for most Chinese immigrants. Some were detained for many years living under near barbaric conditions. In 1882, the U.S. government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, one of the most egregious impediments to free immigration in U.S. history. This was replaced in 1943 by the Magnuson Act, which permitted Chinese nationals already living in the U.S. to become naturalized citizens. It was a political move due to China and America’s allegiance in WWII. Although a positive development, it was a strict quota of 105 new Chinese visa entries per year, a disproportionately low ratio compared to other ethnic groups. This restriction was finally lifted at the height of the civil rights movement with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The Act increased the visa quota to 170,000 per year based on immigrant skills and family relationships in the United States. In a resolution sponsored by Rep. Judy Chu (D-California), the first Asian American elected to Congress, the House of Representatives officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act. This rare apology occurred only recently on June 18, 2012. |