B. CHUL A VISTA , CA , 1977; LIVES IN TAMPA , FL
Growing up in Chula Vista, California, Noelle Mason was always conscious of the nearby US-Mexico border. Her father was on the San Diego police force and often worked with the border patrol. In 1984, he was directly involved in the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre, a deadly attack by a lone gunman who shot forty people, almost all Mexican or Mexican American.
Aware of the ever-present violence surrounding the border, Mason began in 2005 to collect illicitly distributed images of fugitive border crossings, some taken by government patrols. Some were infrared surveillance views of late-night passages. She appropriated these pictures and recast them as embroideries and tintypes. Later, she obtained secret X-rays of trucks bringing immigrants across the border, amid the cargo. The X-rays were produced by border-patrol officers using vehicle-mounted backscatter X-ray technology used to scan large trucks. Mason found most of these images online, circulated by right-wing anti-immigrant vigilante groups. Using the archaic cyanotype photo process, Mason printed them as single images and as massive grids. At the same time, she also appropriated public-domain satellite imagery of the US-Mexico border at places of historical conflict, including Matamoros, Mexicali, El Paso, and the Colorado River Delta to produce elaborate and colorful tapestries, manufactured in Mexico.
This installation is part of the exhibition Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging, curated by Maya Benton. Parallel Lives draws attention to complex notions of community and belonging, and in particular how our social and familial relationships have been reimagined as a result of the conditions of isolation and uncertainty imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Photo: Noelle Mason, Backscatter Blueprint (The Expulsion), 2020