The Fence and the River: Representations of the US-Mexico Border in Art and Video
1996; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1522-5321
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American Literature Studies
ResumoIn Spring 1992, Terry Allen, a multimedia artist known for his exploration of the mythology of the US Southwest, was invited to do an installation at Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts as part of that institution's artist-in-residence program. The Wexner Center installation, entitled a simple story (Juarez) [sic] , was the continuation of a project begun over twenty years ago, which has included record albums, a radio play, photographs, video, sculpture, collages, prints, and drawings. At the Wexner Center the artist constructed three sets: a cantina (Melodyland) , an airstream trailer encased in the wooden hull of a ship (The Perfect Ship), and a gas station (Stations). These sets loosely correspond to episodes in a simple story's scripted narrative, which tells of four characters, Sailor, Spanish Alice, Chic Blundie, and Jabo, whose destinies become intertwined.1 a simple story traces the journeys of these four from southern California to Cortez, Colorado, where Jabo and Chic murder newlyweds Sailor and Alice in a trailer and eventually part ways after they escape to Juarez. Allen does not fix Juarez' s characters or their location in time or space. Instead, the fragmented episodes of Juarez's narrative function like traces of memory that forge a connection among the depopulated sets of the installation. Allen built the sets at two-thirds human scale and theatrically illuminated them with the flicker of video monitors and neon signs. In her Afterword to the published script accompanying the exhibition, curator Sarah Rogers-Lafferty described the video images projected at Stations as hypnotic.
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