Border Erosion, made in collaboration with Clara Brill and Sam Fullilove, examines the shifting geographies and temporalities of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo through an intimate survey of the fluidity of light, sound, earth, and water. The site and time-specific works capture the slow moments along a rock island formation in the low summer river that serves as the political boundary between Texas and Mexico. A light-sensitive scroll is laid upon the length of the island on which material earth is then placed, allowing the interaction of the land and the light to make an image of itself with itself. Spanish dagger yucca and giant reed are collected and processed into handmade paper, their fibers intertwining in a soft communion that reclaims their autonomy from colonial associations. Projected on the paper’s surface is documentation of the artists’ collaboration with the river, abstracted and layered, evoking the stratified memories of the landscape and the absurdity of imposing a fixed role on the living and ephemeral. A sonic meditation unfolds featuring tones and timbres of water, animals and insects by its shores, and aural fragments of the creative process shaping the installation’s visual elements. The process-based work, ex-situ in the gallery environment, asks the viewer, what can we learn from a river by defining it not by the territories that it cuts but by the inter-being connections that it fosters?
shea carley 