48
May 2016
Arts
www.GilbertSunNews.com
Art exhibit on discarded objects force look at illegal immigration dilemma BY SRIANTHI PERERA
Belying the manner in which they must have been discarded, the rosaries, water bottles and Snickers bars are arranged in an orderly fashion in artist/photographer Tom Kiefer’s art prints. Art must have been the furthest from the minds of the owners of these personal objects. The food, medicine, soap, toothpaste, Bibles, pre-paid telephone calling cards and the dozens of other items that comprise Kiefer’s images once belonged to migrants and smugglers apprehended by Border Patrol agents. They were considered nonessential items and dumped in the trash while the individuals were being processed at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facility in southern Arizona. Kiefer’s art prints form “El Sueno Americano” (The American Dream), and are on display in Gallery 4 at Art Intersection through June 18. They reveal a hitherto unknown side to processing illegal immigrants at our Southern border. Kiefer, who was raised in the Seattle area and lived 20 years in Los Angeles, worked 11 years as a part-time janitor/landscaper at the U.S. Border Patrol facility in Why. During this time, he transported more than 60 tons of discarded food to the food bank in Ajo. “When I first started working, the agents themselves would bring the food that was not thrown in the trash to our local food bank,” Kiefer said. “In 2005, after a change of leadership at the station, a decision was made that all the food had to remain in the trash and be disposed of in the trash and taken to the landfill.” In 2007, as the volume of migrants and smugglers peaked, so did the food and other belongings. Kiefer volunteered to transport the food to the food bank. “They really appreciated that gesture,” he said. “One day, there was this big group of toothbrushes, and, from an ecological standpoint, I thought that these shouldn’t go to the landfill, so I just set aside the toothbrushes,” he said. “That’s when
I started collecting the personal belongings.” Kiefer resigned from his job in 2014 to work on El Sueno Americano and plans to make about a 1,000 images for the project from the enormous archive of material he has gathered. While some prints have been shown in public since last year, the Gilbert gallery’s exhibition of 60 prints is its first official showing. According to a release from the gallery, the initial images from the project, released in August 2015, received immediate recognition from contemporary photography sites LensCulture’s Top 50 Emerging Photographers and Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50. Alan Fitzgerald, owner of Art Intersection, said that violation is one of the first emotions that Kiefer’s body of work provokes. “What is particularly interesting is the sense of dehumanization by taking simple, yet important, objects like rosaries and Bibles away from these people and not returning them,” he said. “This exhibition is intended to create a connection because many of these objects are things that we have or use in everyday life.” Kiefer, who declared himself an artist and not an activist, said that he’s merely creating an awareness of what is happening and a platform for dialogue. “We just can’t keep, as the politicians think, kicking the ball down the road,” he said. He noticed that many individuals who are crossing into the United States are not doing it for the first time. “They’ve lived here two to three years, for decades. They had to go down to Mexico because they are not going to miss their grandfather’s funeral,” he said. “And they were aware of the risk that when they went down, they may not be able to return and they could be captured and arrested. Fitzgerald said that the messaging is about a lack of reasonable immigration laws. “Laws that perhaps we might be able to enforce because they’re plausible, they’re reasonable and we
“Water Bottles:” Water is the main source of hydration when crossing the desert. In the Tucson sector of the U.S./Mexico border, heavy-duty nonbiodegradable black plastic bottles are commonly used as canteens and are occasionally covered or insulated with remnants of clothing or blanket. Tom Kiefer/INSTITUTE
don’t continue to create this illegal immigration issue,” he said. Gallery 4 has previously exhibited portraits of the Lost Boys of Sudan, homeless men from the social project I-Help Chandler, a religious festival of Venezuela and the Holocaust death camps in Central and Eastern Europe. The gallery is devoted to visual art exhibitions with strong social, environmental and cultural messages using mediums of photography painting, mixed media and the spoken word. “The exhibitions are intended to bring the other side of art, the social side of art rather than the fine art side,” Fitzgerald said.
Art Intersection, located at 207 N. Gilbert Rd., Suite 201, in downtown Gilbert, promotes the intersection of photography with related art forms. El Sueno Americano runs through Saturday, June 18 and admission is free. A gallery talk and book signing will take place from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 18. Call (480) 361-1118 or visit www.artintersection.com More on the photographer at www.tomkiefer.com