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Description
Garden and Landscape Sculpture and Installations For inSITE2000 Brazilian artist Valeska Soares was drawn to work directly with the border fence that divides the US and Mexico. Soares wanted specifically to find a way for people on either side of the border to be able to come together around a common theme or event and in some way create an exchange, or the illusion of an exchange, across the fence. Her initial proposal was for a garden project that would require a reconfiguration of the fence, yet it proved to be impossible to obtain permission to realize this idea. Soares changed her proposal but remained faithful to her concept of creating an opening in the fence. With Picturing Paradise the artist installed two highly polished large sheets of steel directly onto a section of chain-link fence at Playas de Tijuana, back to back, and as it were, creating the illusion of an opening in the fence, except what was seen was a reflection. Each mirrored surface was inscribed with an excerpt from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, a text that speaks of two mirror cities and what describes their shared reality. --inSITE2000 Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, La Jolla, 92093-0175 (https://lib.ucsd.edu/sca) This image is a scan of a 35mm color slide from the InSite Archive (MSS 707, Box 310, Folder 06, Item 366) [Title, Date]. InSite Archive. MSS 707. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego. Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (Calif.) Border Field State Park, San Diego Tijuana, Playas de, Baja California Norte, Mexico
Type
image
Format
Steel (alloy); mirrors; Texts (document genres)
Form/Genre
sculpture (visual work) installations (visual works) fences public art
Language
No linguistic content
Subject
Political art Boundaries Reflections (perceived properties) Border art Sculpture (visual work) Installations (visual works) Fences Public art Mexican-American border region InSITE2000
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