Leticia Pardo’s installation migajas (32.53384˚N, 117.12311˚W) is a series of white paper squares in frames suspended from the gallery ceiling. They effectively form a kind of wall or barrier sectioning off a corner of the space. It’s not clear whether you’re “allowed” to walk behind them.
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This uncertainty is appropriate because the squares are paper embossed with fragments of the U.S./Mexico border wall that fell to the ground while two men were climbing over it to enter the States. If you do go around to the illicit “back” of the piece, you can see slight rust stains and discolorations left by the embossing process; the traces of a crumbling barrier circumvented once by the men climbing over the wall and then again by you, moving around the gallery. Pardo—who herself moved from Mexico City to Chicago—uses the movement of materials and people to suggest that the barriers separating land and people can be crossed both physically and conceptually. Those crossings, in turn, can perhaps bring down the barriers themselves, leaving us free to move and to think in different ways.
Pardo’s wonderful piece is part of a six-artist show at the Hyde Park Art Center on the south side of Chicago titled “Positions: New Landscapes.” According to exhibitions and residency manager Mariela Acuña, who curated the show, landscape painting and photography in the past has been “very rooted in colonial thinking,” with imagery that told the story of white men finding and........