El Sueño Americano: The American Dream
El Sueño Americano
Saugatuck Center for the Arts
October 25 - December 22 2018
As a younger artist, Tom Kiefer set out to document the American landscape. Trained as a graphic designer, he applied his eye for striking compositions to the natural and built environments of the American West, documenting roadside landmarks and wispy desert clouds. His photographs have always captured the tension between both the iconic and the ephemeral.
After relocating to the Arizona-Mexico border, Kiefer took a job as a janitor for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. In this role, his daily routine included handling objects that the Border Patrol confiscated from migrants, objects deemed “non-essential” and “hazardous.” Kiefer’s focus shifted to a different American landscape -- one marked by the material traces of abandoned homelands, perilous journeys, and uncertain dreams.
El Sueño Americano (The American Dream) is Kiefer’s photographic documentation of these objects once carried by migrants in pursuit of a better life — and confiscated by the U.S. government. This exhibition is but a small sampling of the thousands of photographs of migrants’ belongings that Kiefer has taken over the last decade.
Kiefer’s extraordinary care for these objects — “sacred objects,” as he calls them – is evident in his process that involves meticulous sorting, categorizing, arranging and rearranging just so. He is intimately involved with caring for, archiving, and preserving the life of these objects that range from the mundane to the sacred. Since he began collecting, he has not discarded a single object, whether a bar of soap or Bible.
Kiefer balances this intimacy with a critical distance. Unlike other artists who have documented migrants’ belongings, the objects in Kiefer’s photos are totally divorced from their original context, adding yet another layer of ambiguity to what could be seen as a visual touchpoint to a heated political debate. Kiefer’s work resists tidy narratives or partisan propaganda. The formal qualities of the photos – their systematic documentation, aerial perspectives, and dead-on shots portray these charged objects with a measure of matter-of-factness. There are no extras, no distractions, nothing to provide a buffer between what these objects lay bare: the human stories.
This exhibit is Kiefer's first solo show and debut of this body of work.
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