Traces of Existence

What Makes It Great? / Featured / April 24, 2024

By Elin Spring and Suzanne Révy

With our Presidential election looming, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA meets the contentious issue of immigration head-on in its current exhibit “Traces of Existence.” Five photographers from Latin America, some of whom are US citizens, offer their moving personal explorations of identity, homeland, and migration, on view through June 9^th, 2024.

“Pulse: Replicas, 1986 (Homage, Julio Sequeira)” by Muriel Hasbun, 2020, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

Feature Image: “Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.28.048 (Niño/17-111-83)” by Muriel Hasbun, 2020, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

In in Pulse: New Cultural Register, Muriel Hasbun crafts a sensual, layered analogy between the legendary seismographic activity of her native El Salvador and the Salvadoran cultural epicenter in which she was raised during its equally quaking civil war. Atmospheric images recalling her childhood are overlaid with graphic records of the earth’s tremors in a way that suggests traces of human heartbeats firing in unison. In this way, Hasbun’s impressionistic images coalesce her own family’s story and memories with the literal heartbeat of El Salvador. Often, her textured, earth-toned works are homages to art and cultural leaders including her own mother, adding deeper meaning to the stirring emotions evoked in her achingly gorgeous work.

“Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.28.02.035 (Apparición: Mother and Child, 1983)” by Muriel Hasbun, 2020, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

“Pulse: Seismic Register 2020.02.26.154 (Peace, January 1992)” by Muriel Hasbun, 2020, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

“New Land 227” by Rodrigo Valenzuela, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography (installation view by Elin Spring).

“New Land 230” by Rodrigo Valenzuela, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography (installation view by Elin Spring).

Starting with sweeping photographic vistas of the Atacama Desert in his native Chile, Rodrigo Valenzuela creates his New Lands by overlaying intersecting lines and geometric forms that suggest the architectural containment of wild spaces. His oversized, immersive works on canvas contrast soothing palettes and elegant dimensionality with rugged, untouched terrain. Valenzuela’s entrancing works infer an uneasy metaphor: the alteration of land with borders intended to control human movement and use.

“New Land 240” by Rodrigo Valenzuela, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography (installation view by Elin Spring).

“New Land 241” by Rodrigo Valenzuela, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography (installation view by Elin Spring).

From the series “Faces” 2019, by Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

“Women in Skirts” 2019, by Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography (installation view by Elin Spring).

Seven interrelated projects comprise Alejandro Cartagena’s Photo Structure at the Griffin. All are arrays of discarded B&W photographs that he alters to investigate the paradoxes of Latin American identity. By sorting recovered vernacular snapshots into groups like “Family Vacation” and “Faces,” Cartagena builds a sense of recognition and nostalgia for the ways we remember our lives. However, he also systematically cuts out the faces or bodies in each photograph. The violent excision of identities or missing people, as in the series “Women in Skirts” and “Disappearance,” directly address the elusive Latinx sense of agency and their relentless exposure to domestic political perils.

From the series “Family Vacation” 2019 by Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

“Disappearance” 2019, by Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography (installation view by Elin Spring).

From the series Una mexicana en Gringolandia, by Ileana Doble Hernandez courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

From the series Una mexicana en Gringolandia, by Ileana Doble Hernandez courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

In Una mexicana en Gringolandia (“A Mexican Woman in Gringoland”), Ileana Doble Hernandez juxtaposes documentary photographs made at parades, amusement parks and city streets to create dialogs that contrast popular American culture with an immigrant perspective. In one pairing, she brings historic Revolutionary War re-enactors wearing the traditional red uniforms of the British into a conversation with the reflective yellow vests of immigrant construction workers. Hernandez deftly builds dichotomies between belonging and alienation, questioning what the American dream means to newly arrived immigrants. Her accompanying collages employ type and magazine titles to examine the meanings of language in constructing the myth of America.

From the series Una mexicana en Gringolandia, by Ileana Doble Hernandez courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

From the series Pollage: Politcal + Collage by Ileana Doble Hernandez, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

From the series Paso del Norte by Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, courtesy of the artist and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

From the series Paso del Norte by Alejandro “Luperca” Morales, courtesy of the artist and Griffin Museum of Photography.

In Paso Del Norte, Alejandro “Luperca” Morales presents dispassionate overhead images and video footage from a publicly accessible livestream camera. We observe people crossing in both directions on the Paso del Norte International Bridge between Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas on the opposite bank of the Rio Grande. Sometimes they are escorted and other times seem aimless. They wear cowboy hats, T-shirts with American flags, clothing from detention centers or gear like “space blankets” donated by NASA. Morales’ accumulated records of government surveillance pointedly question the policies of both countries and, in the process, impart a visceral sense of migration as a fraught and very human journey, one that continues to fuel the fires of political polarization in the US.