The U.S. –Mexico Border Project: Tracing the physical and psychological borderlands.

What does the physical and psychological space of the U.S–Mexico Border look and feel like? As a visual artist I have been interrogating this question since 2007, traveling each year to work in Brownsville, Texas, Matamoros, Mexico and the surrounding Rio Grande Valley. I walk the border and photograph the objects that are left behind as individuals swim across the Rio Grande River, change from wet clothes into dry clothes and continue their journeys to an uncertain future in the United States. I photograph the objects in place and then ship them back to my studio where I rephotograph them and place them in an Anti-Archive. These present day archeological remains range from toothbrushes and lipsticks, to passports and bullets, each coming with it’s own incomplete narrative and history of flight, surveillance, and fear.

Interventions

 In 2009, I began a series of yearly site-specific art interventions, sometimes working communally and sometimes alone.  The first year I worked with a group of artists from the United States and Mexico to create Crossing Over: A Floating Intervention (2009), a temporary floating bridge made out of colorful children’s inner tubes. In 2010, I created Loss, a giant wreath that was placed on the newly erected border fence. In 2011, I worked to change the landscape and meaning of the objects left behind by encircling them with protective blue lines in Blue Circle Project, Laredo, Texas. In 2012, I produced a series of performative pieces, Humanizing the Border, exploring the idea of body as border. For my final performance in the series, My Mother’s Teacups, I transported my mother’s bone china teacups that she had carried from England (where my ancestors are from) to the border and photographed them there to address the idea that most people in the United States are immigrants.




Crossing Over: A Floating Intervention, Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico, 2009. I worked with a group of artists from Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico to create a temporary floating bridge made of children’s inner tubes that united Mexico and the United States underneath the Gateway International Bridge. We also created a Welcome Table from found materials and gave away swimming, running, and canoeing trophies to people crossing. 


 


Loss (Wreath), Brownsville, Texas, 2010. I made an oversize wreath and placed it on the Border Fence. The work was based on a found wreath from a local cemetery. I used traditional materials, processes and colors to create it.






Blue Line Intervention, Laredo, Texas, 2011. I left the objects in place and drew a protective blue chalk line around them as I found them in the landscape.




Humanizing the Border Performance, Nuevo Progresso International Bridge between the U.S. and Mexico, 2012. My body became the border.
 


  
Humanizing the Border Performance, Rio Grande near McAllen, Texas, 2012 My body became the border.


 


My Mother's Teacups, Rio Grande near McAllen Texas, 2012. I transported my mother’s bone china teacups that she had carried from England (where my ancestors are from) to the border and photographed them to address the idea that most people in the United States are immigrants.

Congrats to Ana Martinez for her new publication. She includes my work in Chapter 14 Relics, Artifacts, and Bones: Activating Migrancy's Traces Through Performance.

Link to the Book is here. 

https://www.routledge.com/Puppet-and-Spirit-Ritual-Religion-and-Performing-Objects-Volume-II-Contemporary-Branchings-Secular-Benedictions-Activated-Energies-Uncanny-Faiths/Orenstein-Cusack/p/book/9780367713799?srsltid=AfmBOopkns5VJkGs_3s6pRYiU17jbVE2DrfDTwSIE60jfMR14Arcdx5L

..........................

Thanks to Ana for highlighting this important subject.

SHIFTS - 2022

Shifts - A conceptual series of photographic self-portraits thinking about bordering and bodies.

The painting is gouache on old maps I found at a flea market in Italy. I took the maps apart and rearranged them into this borderline.....blue references water for me in this work and the black interrupted line the traditional marking on a map for a border or division of some sort. I have also been thinking recently about "The Commons" and how that historically existed.

Close to Home (November 19, 2024 – March 23, 2025) is a celebration of CAM’s collection featuring works by artists with a connection to our state, our region, and our home. Join us as we explore images of people and places that evoke the varied spirit of our community. Hidden treasures join beloved familiar works in a showcase of artistic voices, a collective search for the meaning of home.

Bridging Borders, July 17, 2023, Spello, Italy

We spoke on the phone and did some planning but Tamara Soldan and I had only one day in person before our performative collaboration to finalize what we were going to do. We gathered voices from friends and colleagues talking about borders in their lives prior to coming together. 

I wanted to know what people thought about borders and what exactly the word border meant to them.

Congrats to the McColl Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was so fortunate to have many ties to the McColl Center through a residency, exhibitions, and leading/teaching workshops through the Innovation Institute. It is a place of community, dialogue and a commons for the arts.

Standing Performance (2005-2023)

Standing on a very narrow history of patriarchal art that many of us grew up on. 

This collection of H.W. Janson's "A History of Art" books is the last thing left in my office before I retire. Coincidentally, my office was previously a women’s dorm room at UNC. I used to use these books in a performance designed to deconstruct art history on the first day of my Women and Gender in Contemporary Art Course.

Susan Harbage Page Wednesday, November 8th, at 7 pm EDT on Zoom Join us for a dynamic and exploratory conversation with Susan Harbage Page as she shares more than 15 years of meditations and explorations on the U.S.-Mexican border. As a socially engaged citizen Susan Harbage Page uses a variety of media including photography, performative interventions, sculpture, video, works on paper, and more.

New Exhibition Catalogue out. Published for the exhibition Susan Harbage Page: Embodied Cartography in Terretorial Disputesat Davidson College fall 2022. The exhibition was curated by Director of Davidson College Art Galleries, Lia Newman and includes essays by Ana L.
Contact Info
Contact Info
susanharbagepage@gmail.com
LINKS
Blog Archive
Loading
Dynamic Views theme. Powered by Blogger.