Im'migration", 2013-present
People and animals migrate for many different reasons dictated by the situation: for food, for shelter, for water, for better weather, for jobs, for their dreams, for comfort of loved ones, or simply to get away from danger. While other animals mainly fall in one of these categories, humans are the only species to travel for leisure. Neither to forage nor hunt, we seek to quell our wanderlust. In Australia the aborigines call it a “Walk about”.
Whatever the “walking about” is about, there is a relationship between our intentions and the place.
The place that I stand today, cradled the footprints of the buffalo and the Native Americans who hunted them. The “Ciboleros”, Mexican buffalo hunters, during the 1820’s, also worked the Wyoming plains trading with the natives. Today the buffalo are replaced by fields of alfalfa, cattle, and drilling rigs. There are no more migrations of these beasts that roamed freely, not recognizing borders of states or property lines. The faint herds are relegated to personal stocks or on protected parks and lands. Yet on this land, people have migrated thousands of miles disregarding borders, escaping dangers, and quietly living camouflaged in the landscape. The migrant workers have come to work the land, to grow food and raise cattle, and send back money to their families in their hometowns.
In my own walk about, I want to be naïve of the issues and the hardships that sculpt the land. I want to see the romantic visions of buffalo roaming freely and Native Americans looking like “proper tobacco store Indians”, to see cowboys with six guns and chaps, spitting into bronze containers. I want to close my eyes and not see the faces of innocent girls like Brisenia Flores(whose image appears on each buffalo), who was murdered by Minute Men in her home in Arizona; her family mistaken for being illegal, and robbed and shot and left to die in her mother’s arms. The collateral lives lost as a consequence of inflammatory rhetoric that permeates our country.
I am torn with the guilt of wanting to see my ideal images verses the complex difficulties that surround a place. The work I’mmigration is therefore a response to the conflicting feelings I have of being a tourist in Buffalo, Wyoming. It combines the folded paper (origami) traditions of my immigrant Japanese background, with the disappearance of the migratory buffalo. These beasts carry with them the burdens of the people living and working on the land. The buffalo are installed in small towns with abandoned storefronts, the youth migrating to large cities for better opportunities. They are installed on the plains with the romantic intent to honor the lives of the animals and the people that worked and are still harvesting the land. The Japanese fold origami cranes in hopes that a loved one will recover from illness or ward off bad luck. My gesture of folding the buffalo touch upon these hope for the place, though I know that at the end of the day, they are only naïve paper dreams of a tourist.
cht Club. (Click on each image for more information)
