Lapse, I-V

The series Lapse (I-V) responds to the city and port of Mobile as a site of exchange, colonial histories, and arrivals and departures. The works query the porosity of borders and bodies, and of the infrastructures that hold both. The fluidity of bodies—political, social, ecological, biological—is evoked through the simple forms in Lapse (I-V) which might stand in for pipes, clothed figures, or tenous columns. The use of Concrete Canvas—a sustainable alternative to mixing concrete for applications such as irrigation and erosion control—combined with a process of forming that relies on tying, folding, rolling, and draping before curing and setting, formalizes this intersection of body and infrastructure (or, body-as-infrastructure). The works confront the impossibility of bordering as a stable and fixed (im)position and instead gesture toward the moments when such bodies lapse into and out of one another, when they might become unstable, leak, or spill over.

In Borderwaters, Alabama Contemporary Art Center
The phrase “American border” typically conjures up the land-based geopolitical boundaries of the contiguous United States, usually concerning the U.S.-Canada and, more frequently, U.S.-Mexico border. The artists in this exhibition contest such continental connotations, reconceptualizing U.S. boundaries as borderwaters. Their projects emphasize the shorelines of the U.S. and its island regions; the historical and contemporary significance of waterways—ranging from inland rivers to international oceanic passages—and their inextricable linkage with colonialist, imperialist U.S. policies; and the ecological inseparability of waterways that ensures changes in one area’s borderwaters have global effects.