By Anne Hall

This exhibit is an interactive installation that includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, text and writing.  A team of artists worked together to create the art that fills the indoor and outdoor landscapes that was adorned with symbols of identity, culture and what could appear as everyday norms.

The gallery opening reception for The Fence/La Barda took place on Sept. 13 at Art Produce Stone Paper Scissors Gallery in San Diego.

They adorned the building’s windows and rear garden fencing with what appeared to be paper seagulls that were cutouts of birds from magazine pages that reflect on freedom and flight. Entering the doorway, observers were greeted with the months’ itinerary as the art series is scheduled to have numerous events take place through Oct 25.

This “bi-national art installation, performance and lecture series” is designed to be an “interactive, collaborative installation” according to the press release, which includes a tentative performance by Moya Devine on Sept. 25 and a bi-national exhibitions lecture featuring Jill Holstin and Anna Stump at 7 p.m. on Oct. 2.

A large part of the work focused on how Mexico utilized a means for recycling homes that are commonly identified as transported houses.  These homes were made up of plaster, recycled wood, old wood pallets and other easily accessible materials. Because these homes had no foundations when they were abandoned, they were simply picked up and recycled to be reused elsewhere as additions to other people’s homes or to satisfy the needs of new tenants.

The campaign will end at 7 p.m. on Oct. 18 with a presentation about these transported houses by Laura Migliorino and Anthony Marchetti, who are coming from Minnesota to present Occidente Nuevo: Recycled Tijuana.

Anna Stump chaired the whole year-long collaboration.  Students from Southwestern College contributed the transported houses that were models hanging from the ceiling of the gallery. There was a considerable amount of difficulty in the collaborative intentions of the artists for creating this event due to the fact that the artists had such a difficult time meeting.

“They never met because they had so much trouble getting across the border,” a professor and contributing artist, Grace Gray-Adams, said. “The reason I became involved in the campaign is because I had a fence.”

The fence that is far more “transparent” than the original, as so eloquently stated by a nearby spectator had shared, was donated by Gray-Adams to help create the divide where the participants must decide where the differences lie on one side of the fence as opposed to the other. Where one side of the fence is far more dense, smaller and cut off from so much, the other side of the fence is lush with a garden that leads to a path filled with lines from a poem called “Discontent” by Nilly Gill. It directs the public to the other side of the fence that has no other way finding a way out than retracing footsteps back into the garden and outdoors.

There is much for the spectator to observe and ponder.  So much is addressed in the exhibit that it becomes powerful as a unit.