Installation view, Challenging Borders, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018
photo by Bill Owen
Installation view, Challenging Borders, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018. Painting on mobile wall: Michael Dixon, Black Men Beware! from The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same series, 2018. Oil on canvas
Photo by Bill Owen
Black Men Beware! is part of a larger series called The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same, a response to police violence perpetrated against unarmed black men, women, and children. A self-portrait of the artist holding a Sambo doll—a racial caricature originating in the 19th century—Black Men Beware! connects the contemporary abuse of the Black body to the ongoing legacy of America’s racist history. Shirtless, clutching the doll, and looking with concern somewhere outside the frame, the figure’s evident vulnerability counters a long history of mass media representations of black men as violent and dangerous. The painting likewise explores Michael Dixon’s own complicated position within contemporary conversations on race. As a light skinned, biracial man who sometimes “passes” as white, Dixon describes occupying an in-between space that does not fit neatly into a racial category.
Installation view, Lori Kella, Strange Crossings series, 2014
Photo by Bill Owen
As a space of transit where physical borders are largely invisible, the sea is a powerful symbol of border crossing. Lori Kella’s Strange Crossings series depicts plausible scenes of seafaring. An unsettling, frozen quality pervades the images, suggesting a reality more constructed than documented. To make Strange Crossings, Kella photographs handmade dioramas, in which she combines elements of familiar places with pure fiction. The resulting compositions conjure a range of associations, from the romanticized history of ocean exploration to the treacherous journeys attempted by political refugees. Kella explains, “These tableau photographs highlight the surface beauty of the ocean, but they also illuminate what cannot be seen, the mysteries and dangers that lurk at ocean depths.”
Byron Rich, M-Ark I (Microbiome Ark), 2017
PLA print, gold, stainless steel, anodized stainless steel, carbon fiber, aluminum porcelain, animation
Photo by Bill Owen
With M-Ark I (Microbiome Ark), Byron Rich confronts the possibility a planet rendered uninhabitable by climate change. In the context of this exhibition, M-Ark asks whether borders matter in the face of planet-wide catastrophe, a catastrophe that does not recognize national or political divides. M-Ark—represented here as a prototype for a satellite—offers a possibility, however distant, of human regeneration. Carrying a human microbiome, the satellite is designed to crash down to Earth at a time when climate conditions have again become favorable to supporting human life. Rich’s satellite presumes the inevitability of a future mass extinction, a prospect made all the more pressing as we witness the U.S. withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty, among other acts of willful ignorance in the face of climate change.
Steve Nelson, Untitled prints from States of Being series, 2018. Piezography prints.
Photo by Bill Owen
In the States of Being series, Steve Nelson captures tug boats docked at ports-of-call throughout the Great Lakes. The vessels in the fleet pictured date from 1902 to roughly 1950, and while a viewer might not glean their precise age, the images evince an aura of industrial power that belongs to an earlier, bygone era. Aside from documenting vessels designed to cross borders, Nelson’s photographs operate within the borderlands of reality—witnessed and documented by a camera—and memory images conjured in the mind’s eye, an effect achieved through the periscope-like framing of each view.
Ron Abram, selections from Märchenbrunnen series, 2013. Animated film/music by Ato.
Photo by Bill Owen
The viewer experiences the huts in Ron Abram’s Märchenbrunnen series by looking through peepholes, which open onto a montage of film and digital animation. The narrative unfolds in and around the Märchenbrunnen (“Fairy Fountain”) at Friederichshain Park in East Berlin, which functioned as a gay cruising site during the pre-1989 GDR era. Märchenbrunnen refers to 10 limestone figures from Grimm’s fairy tales surrounding the fountain, and it was also a coded term for being gay at this time. When Abram first encountered the fountain, he found the Grimm’s sculptures housed in huts for seasonal weather protection, as they are pictured in the accompanying lightbox photograph. Inspired by those protective huts, Abram creates semi-private viewing spaces in the gallery, casting the audience as voyeurs. The film and animation within explore the covert, subcultural meanings that shape public spaces. Likewise, the project highlights the borders that members of the queer community have been forced to delineate between their public and private selves.
Kristina Bogdanov, Desolation, 2018. Video projection, dryer sheets with cyanotype, rice paper, cast paper birds, white sewing thread, and clay
Hanging: A House Is Not a Home, 2018. Wood, yarn and paper-porcelain
Photo by Bill Owen
Drawing upon her experience growing up in the former Yugoslavia, Kristina Bogdanov addresses themes surrounding the forced migration of individuals in response to political conflicts over which they have no control. In A House is Not a Home, the rickety ladder suggests the need to transcend existing circumstances. The house resting tenuously on the ladder, which looks as though it may collapse at any moment, evokes the precarity of the migrant or refugee attempting to establish a home in a state of transience. Desolation pictures the movement of migration through the projection of a 1995 film documenting refugees feeling Croatia. Paper bird silhouettes sewn onto the surface are apt symbols of migration, evoking the desire to move unimpeded across borders.
Noah Fischer, Untitled watercolors and Art of Survival, a ‘zine created for Challenging Borders
Photo by Bill Owen
In short stories and drawings, Noah Fischer addresses the relationship between borders and economic privilege. While borders are often impermeable for migrants and refugees fleeing violence and seeking safer futures, they do little to impede the flows of people and capital initiated by large and powerful corporations. In the speculative fiction ‘zine Art of Survival, a collection of short stories chronicles the future splitting of the United States into separate ideological territories. The stories focus on how the new domestic barriers impact art communities and the kind of art produced inside the territories. Related works on paper illustrate scenes from the ‘zine, in which a young art historian makes an arduous journey from the Blue to the Red Territories, and art takes on explicitly ethical dimensions.
Installation view, Claudia Esslinger, Horizons series, 2015. LCD displays with video, neon light source, acrylic, and wood.
Photo by Bill Owen
In the series Horizons, Claudia Esslinger conceives of the visual border between earth and sky as a metaphor for the relationship between technology and the natural world. To make SaltTracings, SkyTracings, and SeaTracings, the artist takes video of landscapes, clouds, and seascapes in California and Ohio. The videos are then illuminated with custom-made neon lights, and Esslinger distorts the videos into hypnotic, rolling wave forms. The waves relate to the neon’s oscilloscopic shape--how the neon would look when measured with an oscilloscope, an instrument used to display electric voltage. The images of nature in Horizons are mediated and distorted by electricity, raising questions about, as Esslinger explains, the “power that humanity wields over natural resources, as technologies … interact with nature in both benevolent and destructive ways.”
Sarah Lindley, Table: Horizontal Ground, 2017. Vitreous black clay. Wall: Indefinite Boundaries, 2017. Cut and assembled inkjet prints. Installation includes Perfect White, an essay by Amelia Katanski, a scholar of Indian literature.
Photo by Bill Owen
Indefinite Boundaries is a map assembled from spliced images of the Kalamazoo River, the site of the largest inland oil spill, with segments of the Missouri river where it is crossed by the Dakota Access Pipeline. With this constructed map, Sarah Lindley calls to mind the often unequal power dynamics between American Industry and surrounding land and communities. The clay still lives in Horizontal Ground loosely relate to sites in the map by way of material. Clay is made of earth, moved by water: natural deposits are typically found along riverbanks and lakes. The still lives—campers, grids, abstracted factory fragments—refer to motifs in Amelia Katanski’s related essays, which unpack the racial politics informing American views of land, ownership, and wilderness. The vitreous clay is rich with iron and manganese, which gives it the black color, creating an intentionally stark contrast with the white table and wall. The visual interplay of black and white echoes the racial (and racist) dynamics at the heart of ideologies like Manifest Destiny, used to justify white settler expropriation of indigenous held lands.
Sarah Lindley, detail, Horizontal Ground, 2017, and Indefinite Boundaries, 2017
Photo by Bill Owen
Indefinite Boundaries is a map assembled from spliced images of the Kalamazoo River, the site of the largest inland oil spill, with segments of the Missouri river where it is crossed by the Dakota Access Pipeline. With this constructed map, Sarah Lindley calls to mind the often unequal power dynamics between American Industry and surrounding land and communities. The clay still lives in Horizontal Ground loosely relate to sites in the map by way of material. Clay is made of earth, moved by water: natural deposits are typically found along riverbanks and lakes. The still lives—campers, grids, abstracted factory fragments—refer to motifs in Amelia Katanski’s related essays, which unpack the racial politics informing American views of land, ownership, and wilderness. The vitreous clay is rich with iron and manganese, which gives it the black color, creating an intentionally stark contrast with the white table and wall. The visual interplay of black and white echoes the racial (and racist) dynamics at the heart of ideologies like Manifest Destiny, used to justify white settler expropriation of indigenous held lands.
Jim Krehbiel, Lost and Found, Now Lost Again, Stage 1 -4, 2015-2017. Digital prints.
Photo by Bill Owen
Lost and Found, Now Lost Again relates to Jim Krehbiel’s ongoing research in the Four Corners region of Southeastern Utah, where he studies sites and monuments belonging to the Ancestral Pueblo culture. Krehbiel initially makes drawings from memory, combining elements of site maps and extant rock art. These digital prints, for example, picture kivas—rooms used by the Puebloans for ceremonial and religious rituals—in various stages of alteration and additions made in Photoshop, a process Krehbiel likens to printmaking. The prints are imaginative translations of the archeological sites, likely recognizable to those who know the region, while appearing more abstract to an audience unfamiliar with the terrain.
In 2016, President Obama designated the area where Krehbiel works as Bears Ears National Monument, thus protecting it under the Antiquities Act. In November 2017, President Trump removed the vast majority of those protections, leaving the sites vulnerable to mining—a Canadian company is currently interested in extracting uranium deposits from Bears Ears. Krehbiel’s work explores the volatility of protective borders, and the digital prints serve as haunting representations of sites poised to disappear.
Keith Allyn Spencer, Find the 2 and You Will Be Kissed Tomorrow. 555…, 2017. Paint on car cover on car.
Photo by Bill Owen
Find the 2 is a roving and rogue installation that appears without warning throughout the Allegheny College campus. A car cover painted with lowrider graphics, Find the 2 symbolically transforms cars into lowriders. In El Paso, Texas, where Spencer grew up, lowriders—low-to-the-ground cars painted in candy colors and customized with hydraulics and chrome—are common fixtures and signifiers of Latinx identity. While often celebrated in movies and more recently, in more serious museum exhibitions, lowrider culture remains subject to stigmas and stereotypes surrounding presumed connections to drugs or gangs. Find the 2 is a cultural emissary from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, working against existing stereotypes by staging unexpected and joyful encounters with its public.
Sandy de Lissovoy, L: Ohio 13, 9, 11, and 3, 2019; Texas 28, 15, 34, 35, and 20, 2019. Aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic paint.
Photo by Bill Owen
Gerrymandering manipulates the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor one political party over another. Outdoor sculptures by Sandy de Lissovoy contain the outlines of nine of the most gerrymandered congressional districts of our current Congress, located in Ohio and Texas. The gerrymandered shapes adhere more to the logic of partisan border creation than to any meaningful relationship with topography or city limits, and in this way they function like intricate, abstract drawings. De Lissovoy bends and stacks the outlines to make precarious forms that look like modernist abstractions, but here mobilized as subversive political commentary. The outlines are painted in a range of pastel tones, all variations on blue and red, relating to the colors of the electoral map.
Sandy de Lissovoy, Texas 28, 15, 34, 35, and 20, 2019. Aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic paint.
Photo by Bill Owen
Gerrymandering manipulates the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor one political party over another. Outdoor sculptures by Sandy de Lissovoy contain the outlines of nine of the most gerrymandered congressional districts of our current Congress, located in Ohio and Texas. The gerrymandered shapes adhere more to the logic of partisan border creation than to any meaningful relationship with topography or city limits, and in this way they function like intricate, abstract drawings. De Lissovoy bends and stacks the outlines to make precarious forms that look like modernist abstractions, but here mobilized as subversive political commentary. The outlines are painted in a range of pastel tones, all variations on blue and red, relating to the colors of the electoral map.
Sandy de Lissovoy, Ohio 13, 9, 11, and 3, 2019. Aluminum, stainless steel, acrylic paint.
Photo by Bill Owen
Gerrymandering manipulates the boundaries of an electoral constituency to favor one political party over another. Outdoor sculptures by Sandy de Lissovoy contain the outlines of nine of the most gerrymandered congressional districts of our current Congress, located in Ohio and Texas. The gerrymandered shapes adhere more to the logic of partisan border creation than to any meaningful relationship with topography or city limits, and in this way they function like intricate, abstract drawings. De Lissovoy bends and stacks the outlines to make precarious forms that look like modernist abstractions, but here mobilized as subversive political commentary. The outlines are painted in a range of pastel tones, all variations on blue and red, relating to the colors of the electoral map.