On Broken Ground

Amid the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to all nature of public and social programs, from revisionist histories in the national parks and reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service to massive immigration reforms, there has continued much talk about expanding the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Texas’ naturally stunning Big Bend region, which borders the Rio Grande, has been in the spotlight as a potential new location for a lengthening of the wall.

Following the 2016 presidential election, which marked Trump’s first term in office, Hannah Smith Allen began examining aerial imagery of the border wall in California via Google Earth. “Throughout her searches, she noticed that glitches in the mapping software produced digital distortions in the border wall’s structure,” says a statement. “These anomalies appeared as if the wall were opening up or breaking apart and became powerful metaphors for the fragility of the border and the narratives through which the United States constructs its history.”

Allen made three trips to the border to photograph the landscape, which she compiled into screenprinted collages that mirror the glitch effect of digital imagery while also referencing the flat panels of the wall itself. The resulting works, including video, appear in her solo exhibition On Broken Ground at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club, an artist-run nonprofit that has been operating since 1884. “Patchwork” is a descriptor commonly used to describe the aerial view of the U.S.’ agricultural regions, yet in On Broken Ground, she “renders the American terrain fractured and obstructed,” the gallery says, adding that Allen’s “landscapes rupture and split, not only by way of physical barriers but through the weight of their symbolic charge.”

On Broken Ground continues through June 10 in New York. ✧

All images courtesy of the artist and BAXTER ST at the Camera Club.