“X”, Digital Photograph, 2022
My photograph “X” (2022) was featured in the international exhibition “Horizonites” curated by Chantelle Mitchell & Jaxon Waterhouse at Post Office Projects on Kaurna Land in historic Port Adelaide, Australia. The show ran from February 4 to March 1, 2023 and featured photography submissions from all over the world. My photograph documents the border wall divide between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez with noted “X” monument to the Mexican people marking the division of the cities.
Below is some text from the show:
“It is said that there was once a poem that divided a people. Whilst it was nothing special, although certainly nothing derivative, the verse cleaved a community in two. For some who heard it, the poem instilled a sense of awe or wonderment at the horizon — the scant layer of haze where land and sky merged in the farthest distance. They saw in this woozy line a new land, a plain of potentiality. Their critics, however, decried them for their rejection of the actual plains in favour of a land that was illusory. It is said that this schism continues to reverberate, and is the basis of the distrust those who live in the interior of the continent have for those who occupy the edges.
Horizonites emerges from our interest in the devotion that underpinned this conflict and the way in which time, planetarity and connectivity tangle themselves about the horizon line – that ever-present bisection of space that informs much of our existence. The Horizonites are a fictional faction, brought to life by author Gerald Murnane in The Plains (1982). This novel unfurls amidst the oppressive heat of the inland and the rustle of yellowing brush spreading out across paddocks and landscapes. Murnane’s prose captures the diffuse, shifting and obsessive qualities of the horizon, telling the story of those who seek some way in which to understand, and capture the horizon. This exhibition brings together works submitted by photographers from across the globe, realising an archive from a multiplicity of horizons distributed across time and space. Horizonites is an attempt to manifest the horizon; inviting, inscrutable and ineffable.”
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