The exhibition includes a site-specific wall installation created by Bhaumik, utilizing soil from Tule Lake Relocation Center, an internment camp in California near the Oregon border that had a peak population of 18,789 people of Japanese descent from 1942 to 1946. The work references the artist’s heritage and brings scrutiny to the forces of xenophobia that haunt the present.
The exhibition includes an installation of traditional Indonesian shadow puppets, wayang kulit, designed by Myers and executed by master puppet makers in Jogjakarta, Indonesia. Each puppet is drawn from episodes in famed ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky's diaries and ornately carved from buffalo hide and wood and a hand-painted finish. For six months in the middle of 1918, Nijinsky, who would become known as the father of modern dance, kept a meticulous diary; a record of his thoughts as he slipped into a madness that would cause him to be institutionalized for the rest of his life.
Olujimi explores the Euro-centric standardization of time as a colonizing force, and the exhibition includes works from a series titled "Killing Time," which incorporates a variety of handcuffs with garlands of costume jewelry. The works allude to both the power of restraint and the restriction of movement. Some of the handcuffs function as map points, and the elegant swoops of the jewelry strands echo migration patterns drawn against the curved wall of the exhibition space, while others recall the subjects of migration and behave like figure groups. Olujimi's golden garlands are visually alluring and seductive, but they slowly reveal themselves intersecting with the ideas of mass incarceration, fetish, cartography and spatial dislocation.
