Landings 5: Immigration, Modern Art and the Global Community

Landings 5: Immigration, Modern Art and the Global Community

Art Show @ the Museum of the Americas

The exhibition Landings 5 is a group show featuring the work of thirty three artists from across Latin America. The show is located at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington D.C. and will be up until early September. Curated by Joan Duran, the exhibition explores issues surrounding immigration, Diaspora, and “is an attempt to cross-fertilize current cultures and identities in a spirit of collaboration, celebration, inquiry and exploration.” The pieces, although often more successful conceptually than they are aesthetically, nevertheless provide an interesting artists-eye view into the phenomena of border shifting, cultural mixing, and the blending of popular iconography.

The show featured work that mixed popular symbols, objects, and icons from Latin America and the United States, respectively, to create pieces that were at once familiar and alien to the viewer. The promises and letdowns of immigrant dreams, the militarization of border control, the blending of cross-border kitsch pop cultures, satires of gender roles and cultural stereotypes are all themes explored by the artists in Landing 5. The show creates a space that is neither Latin America not the United States, but rather a hybrid of the two.

The pieces that worked perhaps most successfully were those that incorporated well known imagery or symbols and rearranged them to create works that, although familiar to the viewer, were unsettling and foreign. The pieces juxtaposed the traditional with the contemporary, Americana with Latin Americanism, old-world gender roles with feminism, white collar with blue collar, tourism with migration. The end results are pieces that employ the mundane to achieve the unusual, use pop culture to voice counter culture, and rework kitsch into high art.

 

Anyel Maidelin Calzadilla

(blue construction helmets hung against a wallpapered backdrop.)

The show also pointed to a new merging of cultures- the objects and images are familiar to us regardless of where we herald from in the Americas. The show was a great testament to how blended our visual language has become and how much globalism has impacted our interpretation of what otherwise would be thought of as exotic objects. There is nothing that is purely Mexican, just as there is nothing that is purely American- the borders may be built, reinforced, and militarized, but the cultural border have already been breached. Pop cultures in the Americas have bleed over to create something new, something uniquely post-modern.

 

Pieces like Adislen Reyes’ tiffany & cu played on the audience’s expectations and collective cultural knowledge. It is a piece that mixes humor with politics, low brow with high brow. The paper plates are delicately painted and arranged carefully.

The show would have perhaps benefited from more explanation as the pieces were often times much more theoretical than they were visually engaging. Many of the pieces would have been strengthened simply by having their titles labeled. The curater of the show obviously made a conscious decision to omit any written explanations. The only way to guide oneself through the tour was a floor plan of the space, numbered, with the artist’s names. It was not easy to use, and distracted from the experience of the space. A more thought out contextualization to the art, and a chance to hear the artist’s voices in addition to their visual presentation would have made the show meatier. Although the argument could be made that defining the pieces to the viewer may have fenced in dialogue and interpretation, I feel this was a show that would have worked better with a stronger curator presence. The meaning of many of the pieces was much clearer when the title was known.

For instance, one of the first pieces of the show was this series of three beautiful heads by artist Celeste Ponce. Although the piece is lovely as simply an aesthetic work, when the title is known it takes on new meaning:

 

Celeste Ponce o-e-a

The title of this piece is o-e-a. Given the context of the show the title allows for the work to take on a new and more profound meaning. The work goes from being an esoteric visual piece to being a politically charged commentary on language barriers and immigration.

Overall, the show was an interesting, although not groundbreaking, commentary on border culture and globalism.

 

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota