Border Theory and the Artists That Want to Talk About It
INGLEWOOD, CA — In a crouching, starkly lit room in downtown Inglewood, CA, where the walls sag slightly from years of whitewash, Tony de los Reyes curses the ground beneath him.
Paint has seeped onto one of his dusty old sneakers, leaving an orange orb clinging to the tan canvas. The moment is ironic considering the raucous explosions of colors hanging on the walls around him. Some of these paintings are slithering brown, like a photo missing its saturation and stare back hauntingly. Others are the colors of winter scarves, unmissable and moving, shimmering in the November afternoon haze of Los Angeles.
Reyes is one of a breed of visual artists whose work grapples with the Southwestern border of the United States. Though distinctly abstract in appearance, his work asks questions of our political and cultural relationships to the border. At times, his scopious works wonder aloud what vibrancies of culture are let in with such a border. In some works, they urgently probe: what is gaps remain in our nation by the things we deliberately fence away?
To Reyes, borders between countries are simply a blip in the vast timeline of the story of the actual land of North America. As a grandchild of Mexican immigrants who crossed through this border, Reyes’s fascination crescendoed in the 2000s across administrations, policies, and a growing American consciousness of this territory.
The Southwestern border between the U.S. and Mexico is 1,951 miles long and is the busiest in the country. Each year the Southern border alone lets in 300 million people. The goods that pass through this border every single day are valued at $1.7 billion. It’s a moving, constantly shifting place, though the line it draws is static.
Most of the time, our borders come up in discourse in relation to immigration. According to Pew Research, over 1.6 million encounters were reported along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2021 fiscal year.
But contemporary artists are considering so much more than just the immigrants who interact with this border. They think about the land itself as a canvas for division and movement. They consider the predominant narrative of this strange liminal space. They even collect what is left behind and taken.
In order to better understand our much-scrutinized, often illusive boundary, we start with color.
Reyes at work in his Inglewood studio.
Reyes’s studio is stripey and streaky, a cacophony of radon-like paintings and superimpositions that identify themselves as border-related with a quizzical squint.
“I’m not an activist. I don’t make work on behalf of advocacy groups,” he cautions, “Everything that you see here is part of my own personal reckoning. Most of it has been to kind of think of the border outside of the ways that the news and media have been recording it. It’s not just about politics, but place and geography for me.”
While some his landscape paintings look like a Google Earth acid trip, ripping with neon and contour, others are disturbingly quiet. One print appears to be a fuzzy view through the too-small-for-human-spaced pillars, and orients the viewer like a telescope out of focus.
He tells me, “Yeah, for a little while I followed stones alone the border around Calexico. I was photographing them because they themselves are migrating. They witness human time, human actions in a laughable way. It’s older than whatever ‘U.S.’ and ‘Mexico’ really mean. The reason my work is so colorful is so I can bring a psychic way of dealing with the utter weirdness of the place.”
Border Patrol (Nicholson Red), 2018, Courtesy of Tony de los Reyes
In other paintings, Reyes more overtly probes the American psyche about this boundary. In one silkscreen, a picture of Jack Nicholson in the 1982 film, The Border, in which the actor plays a vigilante border patrol agent, lies askew on a cherry candy red dirt, like an abandoned memento. The print is markedly menacing.
Reyes says this was inspired by policies that he began to notice in the early 2000s. His fascination was piqued around the time of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was passed under the Bush administration.
The act was passed with the intention of deterring migrants from crossing the border without detection by augmenting the strength of the wall, and allocated $1.5 billion for the project, though it is estimated that the whole cost would be $50 billion over 25 years. The act was also identified as a grave danger to already endangered species, whose habitats were separated.
Nuevos Testamentos, Tom Kiefer, 2014
Tony is joined in his fascination with the border by other artists like Tom Kiefer, who, in his own words, “secreted away the goods confiscated by migrants at the border,” Malona Badelt, a filmmaker whose short documentary “Mateo’s Story,” traces a grueling family separation and a child’s trauma, and playwrights like Marc David Pinate, whose play Antigone at the Border reimagines classical antiquity’s take on belonging.
Anita Feldman, a director of curatorial affairs at The San Diego Museum of Art, tries to fight any division between the cultures that meet at the border. Feldman says, “We make an effort to devote a significant amount of gallery space to be open to the border and the rising complexity of Tijuana as it is increasingly expanding.”
As Jack Nicholson and his mustache leer from the dirt at the viewer in Reyes’s print, American vigilantism and attitudes toward the border are rendered invincible and puny all at once.
“The border is a way of repackaging yourself as the thing that must be protected. It’s a vicious cycle of value and self-enclosure. In very small ways, the territory of the United States has actually shrunken every time we’ve built a new, bigger wall. It’s a contracting, slithering America,” Reyes muses.