next week a special exhibition opens at the Amon Carter museum in Fort Worth, Border Cantos, with work by Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo. this exhibit brings together numerous strands that i gather together in my work. i first heard about Misrach’s monumental landscape photography when they collaborated with writer Rebecca Solnit reflecting on the marks and scars that have been left upon the US West. (in my work they are called ‘ruins of settlement’). as an aside, it was delightful when i searched for their work together that i learned that one of Misrach’s pieces in SFMOMA’s collection, Bomb and Convoy, Bravo 20 Bombing Range, Nevada, had been a gift from Solnit. Galindo is an artist who uses artifacts found along the border to create musical instruments. jenny had heard about this project previously on PBS, but had lost track of it. the exhibition was previously at the San Jose Museum of Art and they offered this review article Measure of time. One reference in that article further connected some of my work (what i have called ‘lost & found’): Every found object on the Mexican border represents a tragedy. Finally, this brought back photography i’d seen by Thomas Kiefer in an article A former janitor collects and photographs the items seized from immigrants and thrown away by US customs and border patrol. so many inspiring connections as we attempt to make sense of the places we see, live and visit and how we are ‘marked by place’. and what stories do we tell about what is left behind?
