Border Cantos | Sonic Border: Richard Misrach | Guillermo Galindo

Through the lens of art, photographer Richard Misrach and composer Guillermo Galindo give presence to the thousands of undocumented immigrants who cross into the US each year and encourage a humanitarian perspective on the plight of all immigrants. By bringing the border down to human scale, and by putting politics in the context of individual human lives, Border Cantos offers a provocative response to the polarizing discussions around immigration reform that have dominated local and national politics, both today and throughout the history of this country.

Border Cantos: Richard Misrach | Guillermo Galindo premieres immense landscape photographs by Misrach and ingenious musical sculptures by Galindo. Galindo also composes original scores for his assemblage instruments, and recordings of his orchestrations will be featured in an adjacent sound installation. This exhibition highlights the poetic resonance among these images, objects, and sounds. Together, the artists bear witness to the human consequences of a highly militarized, hotly contested border zone. For example, Effigie, a sound composition by Galindo (played on a plucked string instrument made of hollow pieces of wood, string, and discarded clothing) literally and metaphorically amplifies Misrach’s haunting photographs of the human effigies he discovered in the desert.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website