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Notes from the Artist about working on Border Crossers during the pandemic:

Over the last six months while in isolation the Border Crosser project has evolved further on several levels. I was able to work on each of the five machines preparing them to go out into the world and begin performing and filming with them in the border landscape.  I look forward to coming to El Paso and Juarez during 2021 to work with students from ¶¶Òõ¶ÌÊÓƵ and the UACJ (the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez) in preparation for the performances and exhibition, as travel conditions permit.  Students from art and engineering will be an important part of the project team as we go forward.

Time has allowed ideas that make up the underlying foundation of the Border Crossers project and film and exhibition to evolve and grow. In March 2020, I began a series of word maps/ COVID drawings, which are more about the process of notating my thinking about the world we live in while in this pandemic rather than about the pandemic itself.  I began making COVID drawings as a type of map of a given day, week or month. Early in my process of the Border Crossers project, I became interested in subdivisions of walls that would capture some of the separate issues we face as a world society. As the early goal of the project became how to make a series of machines that could grow over the wall from both sides, the wall itself became an intense focus of my ideas. Ideas were triggered by what you can’t see while behind the border wall of the southwest. Then it made me consider all of the borders we face daily and from several points of view.

In the earlier drawings these were juxtaposed visual elements Then as the drawings became more complex, with multiple divisions, I kept track of the visuals by using text to describe what I wanted in the fenced off areas. I began to realize that the words were equally as powerful as the physical locations I was depicting and they had a more automatic unfolding quality which allowed me to not hold back and really notate what was on my conscious mind. These grids made up of border walls allowed me to create maps/words plays as complicated as my reflections on society. Each of the drawings are tied together by the ongoing mountain range and blue sky. All of the divisions are linked together by white lines (white of the paper) as in everything is inter connected and referring to the deep reach of the pandemic as well as the interconnectedness of all things. The power of the word plays which can be read in multiple ways, will guide my search for content over this next year of filming. Each machine will be equipped with its own eye to document their vantage points as they unravel and discover their surroundings.