Opening reception today for Borders: Migrations North + South

Oct. 19—PLATTSBURGH — Four artists offer diverse lenses on "Borders: Migrations North + South, an exhibition curated by Dr. Amy Mountcastle, Department of Anthropology, at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

Opening reception is today from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Burke Gallery.

Besides the guests artists — Paula Allen, Álvaro Enciso, Ruth Kaplan and Bill McDowell — the exhibition was sourced from ongoing research by a group of SUNY Plattsburgh faculty on the irregular border crossing at Roxham Road in Champlain, and includes art, photography, and artifacts related to migrations across the US-Mexico and US-Canada borders.

AT THE CROSSROADS

During her six years conducting ethnographic field work at Roxham Road, Mountcastle met all of the artists.

"I'd known Bill briefly, briefly, from years ago," she said.

"We spent quite a bit of time together, especially Paula, Ruth and I at different times. I got to know them and talk to them about their work. That was kind of the seed and also just kind of seeing all of the different players there like the Plattsburgh Cares folks, and also Bridges Without Borders, the people coming over from Canada.

"That got me to thinking about I would really like to showcase this work and at the same time try to bring in the community to get a handle on trying to inform the community and engage them in what's going on there but through the artistic medium."

In the 20-teens, the college hosted a series of the Festival of Tibetan Arts and Culture of the Adirondack Coast.

"It's kind of that same idea," she said.

"It's a really great way to outreach to not just the campus, but to the broader community in that something that can be impactful or is impactful. That's sort of the seed of the idea."

The COVID-19 pandemic happened, and then Tonya Cribb, director of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum reached out to Mountcastle when the gallery space became available.

"We agreed to do it," she said.

"Really, it starts out as a research project for me and a couple of my colleagues. Over the years, there has been a number of colleagues that have worked with me on this. In the course of doing the research, the ethnographic field work that we do as anthropologists, I wanted to bring this to the community basically.

"With the artists, also, it has such a huge impact on you when you go up there and you see with our own eyes what's going on and you talk to people. We all talked to people. I talked to taxi drivers. I was able now and then talk to the people crossing and hear some of their stories. I talked to Janet McFetridge (Champlain mayor) who was there all the time.

"It's a story that the more pieces of it you have, the better your understanding can become. We can't understand the migration. We can't understand what is happening at Roxham Road just from one perspective, one point of view. I thought with this show, we could bring some of those points of views into the space."

Mountcastle's colleague, Dr. Justin Lowry, and his wife, Ilona Flores, PhD, worked on a material approach to the exhibition.

"I'm kind of like one of the artist in a way, because I am in a small portion of the show," he said.

"We are looking at the objects left behind. The materials that are left behind at the border. Our part of the show are physical objects that were left at the border in the process of crossing. The goal of our research was to look at those material remain to understand more than just the local human migration pattern, but to understand the people who are migrated by virtue of their experience at the border through the lens of these materials."

Basically by looking at the materials, Lowry and Flores are able to see a few interesting things.

"We were able to see when people left behind their identity, their personhood, because they were afraid that their personhood, their identity, their history, would change the way their migration status would be interpreted," he said.

"There are people who left behind things because they were unable to carry them across the border. There were people who left behind things because they wanted to hide information or objects or things. There were a couple of weapons. There were a couple of credit cards. There were a couple of travel documents, things like that, where people were trying to obfuscate their past."

Other objects were left behind because they were misplaced, unintentionally left behind, or simply dropped, fell, or forgotten.

"It shows kind of an experience at the border of stress and anxiety and fear and and hope and imagination," he said.

"By looking at the objects, we can make it more personal for people by allowing them to connect to familiar objects that they would see in their everyday lives. The hope of our part of the show is to ask people to question themselves on why an object was left behind. To think about what's the situation where you would leave behind your driver's license? Or what's the situation where you you drop a stack full of money? Or a situation you would leave your car seat for your child?

"To get people to start to personally understand people's experience, sometimes you can in lieu of having the individual to understand and meet, we can have the objects that they left behind that people can still connect with through a material lens."

Lowry and Flores collected, organized, and documented materials since 2017.

"A selection of those materials were also donated by Janet McFetridge," he said.

"A selection of those objects from both collections are in the show."

ARTISTS STATEMENTS

PAULA ALLEN

"The asylum seekers arrive—in the frigid cold, in rainstorms, in the heat—with heavy suitcases or with nothing but a plastic bag, wearing neck pillows, pushing strollers, often without warm clothes in the winter, strained from the grueling hours of travel. They have often spent months preparing for this journey, selling everything they own or they have fled suddenly, escaping imminent, life-threatening situations.

They come from all over the world—a Nigerian mother and her daughters threatened by Boko Haram; a Guatemalan woman reported to ICE by a neighbor; a Zimbabwean student living in Chicago whose visa was revoked; two sisters from Honduras who left abusive partners and spent six months in a Texas detention facility; thousands of Haitian families escaping ongoing poverty and violence; an elderly woman from Cameroon who left Portland, Maine, as resources for asylum seekers are withdrawn by the government; a young Palestinian woman whose life was threatened due to her political activism, young Russians who refused to fight Putin's war, Afghani families who were enemies of the Taliban; and a young Jamaican man whose life was threatened for being gay.

I have seen parents clutching their children's hands and balancing suitcases on the uneven terrain as they run across the border, while others pause in sudden terror, in prayer and uncertainty. But, they always cross. I have seen kindness coming from the RCMP on the other side—the attempt to assure people they will be safe, the attempt to speak a language that is unknown to them—and I have seen hostility and unnecessary shows of force. I have seen Janet McFetridge who showed up almost everyday for years handing out warm clothes in the winter, stuffed animals to the children and always words of support and kindness. I have seen what a difference her actions make—and know we all have the capacity for these gestures of solidarity and love.

I have seen myself as a crosser, as a person needing to flee and know we are all holding on to our precious lives by a thread. and knowing the greatest strength we have is each other."

{span}Á{/span}LVARO ENCISO

Being here, Being there, Being both

"My name is Álvaro Enciso. I am originally from Colombia, South America. I came to the U.S. in the early 1960s after finishing high school. One of my aunts was living in New York and she agreed to sponsor me to obtain a resident visa. In those years the notion of "The American Dream" was luring many Colombians to leave the country and fly north to los estados unidos-where you could reinvent yourself and earn decent money to buy the things you could never afford back home. I too, wanted to have dollars in my pocket, but also to pursue my own personal dream of getting a college education.

All my work deals in one form or another with the constant search for "The American Dream". When I moved to Southern Arizona in 2011, I learned that thousands of migrants had died crossing the desert, looking to get a crumb of that American Dream. Being a migrant myself, I felt at this stage of my life the pull to participate, albeit indirectly, in that perilous and uncertain journey that migrants nowadays are forced to take to escape abject poverty, violence, lack of opportunities, and more. This was the moment when I could complete the circle of my life as a migrant. In a way, I had been waiting a long time for this moment: The time had come to complete my story. After all, we are the stories we tell.

My work ever since attempts to tell the stories of struggle, suffering, death, broken dreams, that the Sonoran desert secretly holds.I needed to create a new body of work that dealt specifically with what I was seeing and hearing along the migrant trails. Also i wanted to incorporate into the work non-traditional materials, like the rusted tin cans that migrants had abandoned after eating their contents. I imagined that every insignificant can tossed by an undocumented border crosser had a hidden story, and it was up to me to divulge that story using the artifice of art.

I had seen a map of southern Arizona covered with red dots everywhere, so thick with them that the geographical details had been covered. there were thousands of those red dots, each one marking the location where migrant remains had been recovered. while looking at that map, something clicked in my head, a simple idea that could lead me to perhaps, formulate an art project, a conceptual art piece with elements of land art, and performance art, a multimedia project that could also be seen as a contemporary memorial for all the undocumented border crossers who had lost their lives in southern Arizona in the past twenty or so years.

At first I did not want to use the cross to mark the spots where life ended prematurely. The cross already contained enough information; although a symbol of faith, it was also a symbol of the end of life. If I was going to use the figure of the cross, I would have to delve into phenomenology, the elements of perception, the action of seeing something, the implications of context in determining what it is that you are actually seeing. What is in front of you is not always the object that you think it is.

The traditional Christian cross was first used by the Roman Empire to kill publicly, enemies of the empire, false prophets, and common criminals. They were hung on the cross for days under the burning sun, without water until they died. This historical strategy of "prevention through deterrence" is now being used by the border patrol (BP) to "secure" the southern border. By funneling migrants to the most remote and dangerous areas of the desert, away from water sources and roads, the BP wrongly thought that when migrants started dying out there, word of these deaths would reach migrants hoping to cross, and that would be enough to deter them from trying. It never worked because the BP failed to understand the desperation of being poor, and to have no options left, except to cross the desert. This footnote of history repeating itself granted me the license to make a cross, that in addition to the religious symbology it already had, it was also a secular cross associated with capital punishment, and intentional harm.

But the cross as we normally see it is basically a geometrical form or figure that consists of a vertical line and a horizontal line that meet at some point in space and time. For me, the vertical line represented being upright, standing, being alive. The horizontal line signifies death: the person is no longer erect, he or she is now perpendicular to the ground, lifeless. At the point where the two lines meet is the moment when you go from life to death.

Today, 11 years after the inception of my project, I have been able to plant 1,400 crosses in an area covering thousands of square miles. Somewhere along the way, I changed the title of the project from "red dots" to "donde mueren los suenos" (where dreams die), and even though I know that I will never be able to complete the project, that is; to put a cross for every migrant who has died while crossing the Sonoran desert, I continue to be out there every Tuesday, honoring the courage of those who left everything behind to make a dangerous and arduous journey, full of uncertainty, in search of that so called American Dream.

Knowing in advance that my project will remain incomplete because I do not have enough life in me to finish it, this work, whether it is seen as artistic, humanitarian, religious, political, etc., has given me the opportunity to reclaim my heritage, and to complete the circle of my own migration."

RUTH KAPLAN

Crossing

"I began exploring the Roxham Road border site, considered an illegal port of entry to Canada, in late 2018, focusing on the various forces that converge and intersect in response to its existence. These forces include cab drivers who shuttle people from Plattsburgh bus station to the border, asylum-seekers, Canadian border police who control the activity, the rural, North-Country landscape, volunteers who come to support refugees and witness, Plattsburgh bus station, the road between, RCMP border buildings, and objects discarded at the site.

Prior to this project I had been focusing on refugee shelters in US-Canadian border towns, mostly in Buffalo and Detroit, documenting the slow passage of time as people waited for their hearing dates. When I became aware of the Roxham Road crossing I thought it may encapsulate and personify the experience of seeking asylum in one action/site. Initially it was difficult to locate the crossing, but I was able to make my first trip in December of 2018, just before Christmas, with a few Canadian volunteers. On this first visit, I witnessed the arrival of a cab driver, who I would come to see regularly, with a few people crossing. It was very moving and unlike anything I had seen before. This trip led to a long-term project over next few years until it recently closed. While I would often encounter the same people each visit, such as cab drivers and volunteers, the asylum-seekers were ever-changing and moving quickly. I tried to convey these fleeting moments and began conducting follow-up interviews with people who entered Canada that way about their memories of the crossing.

For this exhibition I have included photographs from Highway 87 enroute to the border, an asylum-seeker walking towards the border having been dropped off further down Roxham Road and the border site where asylum-seekers, often family groups, are dropped off by the cabs and prepare to cross with their belongings. These photographs include moments before and after crossing into Canada, a distance of a few steps, where they then wait for entry into the Canadian border building to begin the initial stages of their refugee claim. Mostly photographed from the American side, at one point my vantage point shifts to include the Canadian viewpoint.

The drama of each person's crossing carries the potency of this heightened moment echoing global migration issues but manifested here on a small, manageable scale, making it a unique border site. Global migration, and subsequent displacement,

have increased over the decades. New ways of handling this flow are urgently required.

The traditional iconography of the refugee photograph emphasizes their victimhood and otherness. I hope to challenge this view and show the everyday reality of people with their contemporary belongings and style, as they risk everything to start a new life.

My motivation for making these images is to give voice to those without status and to a situation which people would rather turn away from.

I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council, and Ontario Arts Council."

BILL MCDOWELL

Roxham Road

"I first visited Roxham Road in June 2017. Reports of asylum seekers in the North Country had made the local and national news, and I was outraged by the growing hostility in the U.S. toward anyone who wasn't white or Christian.

If I was to photograph at Roxham, I decided that I had to make photographs that a photojournalist couldn't. I would work slowly and return often. I began to document objects left behind at the border — an item deemed no longer useful, objects too cumbersome to carry any further, or perhaps something forgotten in haste.

I picked up a pile of torn paper fragments sitting on the ground. It was an asylum statement written by a Nigerian woman who compellingly documented why she, her child, and husband were no longer safe in Nigeria. I scanned the document fragments in my studio, redacting any incriminating information.

One day, I found a man's suit hanging from a fence post; it was a handsome suit, gray with pinstripes, made of wool. Had the owner decided that, in Canada, he would no longer need to wear it?

Another day, a mini-van with California plates was parked off to the side. The owners had handed the keys to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police once they crossed the border.

Because of what Roxham Road had now become, everything in the cul-de-sac carried heightened meaning for me. No longer was it traveled only by area residents going to and from home, the mail truck, the school bus, or the snow plow. Now, footprints and tire tracks spoke more of migration and asylum than local traffic.

During more than a year of frequenting Roxham Road, I had refrained from directly photographing people due to the difficulty of requesting permission under such circumstances. and yet, increasingly, I felt it was important to record the passage of asylum seekers into Canada, given what it signified about immigration policies in the United States.

Over several days, I set up a camera to the side of the parking area and video-taped individuals and families as they conferred with the Royal Mounted Canadian Police and then walked across the border. Canada was the last option for the asylum seekers — neither their home countries nor the United States were safe or viable.

From each video, I still-captured a frame and digitally produced a soft, white pod-like shape over each seeker's head. Even though their backs were to the camera, the pod nonetheless denies the viewer the ability to fully witness moments of profound vulnerability. And, for me, it pays homage to the asylum seeker's journey.

The Roxham Road path crosses a 20-foot-wide cut zone maintained by the U.S. Border Patrol, which runs the entire length of the U.S. — Quebec border along the 45th parallel (roughly halfway between the equator and the North Pole).

I periodically walked east and west along the swath, with images still in my head of the trauma visible in the faces of those at Roxham Road who were forced to flee their homes. I photographed the landscape, thinking about the political manifestation of borders, the gate keepers who decide who gets in and who doesn't, and the benefits my gender, age, skin color, and nationality afford me. Birds and trees don't heed the boundary. After all, it's a human invention. Just like race.

These photographs reflect on the incontrovertible that we all share. The celestial scenes, from the project Ashes in the Night Sky, were made by scanning my father's cremated ashes. The grape vines in the photograms, from The Memory of Grapes, were planted by my late brother. They continue to grow in his absence. My time at Roxham Road challenged me to interrogate my role, as an American white man, in the photographs I made. This is my home; I would remind myself. But what is my place in it? How do I bear witness without following the tired tropes that only perpetuate representational injustice? How do I make empathic photographs with layers of connective meaning?"

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell