An Exhibition in Tucson Looks at the Things We Leave Behind

Where one artist collects, another deliberately erases and alters. On Halloween in downtown Tucson, Arizona, Etherton Gallery’s opening of El Sueño, an exhibition of Tom Kiefer’s photographs of migrants’ seized belongings and Alejandro Cartagena’s reconfigured found prints, was extended for seven hours—ten people at a time, maximum, a COVID-era measure that prompted small waves of drifting viewers. The exhibition takes its title from a larger presentation of Kiefer’s work earlier this year at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles (El Sueño Americano/The American Dream); it is given new context here, in the company of Cartagena’s work and a small selection of Mexican folk retablos, vernacular paintings on tin representing the trials of Catholic saints. Perhaps particularly for a visitor to the city—I was working just outside Tucson for several weeks, close to the Sonoran Desert, hyperaware of my own temporary existence there—the exhibition felt attuned to the paths we travel, the things we carry, the impressions we leave behind.

Cartagena’s slashed, cutout, altered, and recollaged found photographs suggest the images we discard, and those that remain. In other series of works, Cartagena—born in the Dominican Republic and based in Monterrey, Mexico—has often focused on hidden and unseen lives and the wide disparity between reality and myth. In Carpoolers (2011–12), he photographed workers riding in the backs of trucks to and from work. In A Small Guide to Homeownership (2005–20; featured in the “House and Home” issue of Aperture magazine and recently published as a photobook by The Velvet Cell), he placed images from previous series, including Carpoolers and Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities (2005–10), with found texts from guidebooks for potential homeowners, highlighting the profound gap between blithe propaganda and reality.

In Cartagena’s Dismembered and Faces series, from his larger project Photographic Structures (2017–19), rather than compounding images, he removes and alters them. He mines landfills and flea markets in Mexico City for snapshots and family photographs, which he then transforms with a sharp blade, slicing and discarding crucial elements of the picture. Faces become empty voids; entire bodies disappear from group photos. Elsewhere, white oval-shaped space hovers above groups of well-dressed people, impressions of souls. Sometimes, he manipulates the cut fragments, juxtaposing an outline of a face against a larger silhouette, like an eclipse.

We are in a world now where many of us have become somewhat accustomed to seeing only aspects of each other, whether on Zoom calls, or out in the world, faces partially obscured by masks. Cartagena’s reconfigurations remove what we think of as the most definitive physical identifiers (eyes, nose, and mouth, for instance); his rearranged leftovers resemble a dissection model of all the empty pieces that exist within us. In one reconstruction, a jaggedly cut-out head leaves a comet-like trail. Cartagena’s restructured photographs call into question their original constructs: how much a picture can tell us, and how lasting are the impressions we leave. As with all found photographs, part of the fascination is the mystery of why they ended up in a stranger’s hands. Why do we hold onto images? Why do we let them go? Seeing them torn apart and remade again, defaced and reincarnated, endows them with a mystic quality. Cartagena renders their absence visible.

Tom Kiefer’s El Sueño Americano (2007–ongoing), centered on evidence rather than absence, occupies the larger gallery, bringing Kiefer’s project, which began in Southern Arizona, closer to its origins. Born in Wichita, Kansas, and raised mostly in Seattle, Kiefer worked as a graphic designer and, later, as an antiques dealer in Los Angeles. In December 2001, he moved to Ajo, Arizona, for a cheaper cost of living that he hoped would allow him to focus on his photographic work.

Ajo is a former copper-mining town, forty miles from the state’s border with Mexico—one of the most dangerous and deadly stretches for migrants coming north, a crossing through the Sonoran Desert that typically takes seven days on foot. Most of these journeys are necessarily invisible, but their stories play out vividly and painfully in Kiefer’s pictures. El Sueño translates to “the dream”—materialized in these taxonomic photographs of the objects carried by migrants and asylum-seekers from Mexico and Central America. Bibles and pocket knives. Water bottles and Snickers bars. Condoms and shoelaces. Floral handkerchiefs, backpacks, cans of tuna fish. Toothbrushes, gloves. A Mickey Mouse hoodie. Photographs, ostensibly of loved ones left behind.

In 2003, Kiefer took a part-time job as a janitor at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility. He had no contact with the people who were taken there, he told me, but when he was given permission to transport the food items and donate them to a local food bank, he was astounded at all the other seized objects he discovered. Plastic hair combs. Wallets. Cell phones. A Hello Kitty backpack. An E.T. doll. A love letter—“Bianca quiero que sepas que te amado desde que tu, Conoci.” (“Bianca, I want you to know that I have loved you since I met you.”) All the things that agents had deemed either nonessential or “potentially lethal” were taken away from migrants and asylum-seekers about to be detained. Kiefer was haunted by them all.

With no way of finding the owners, he began collecting these items. Rosaries. Medication for depression. CDs. Baby shoes. Makeup compacts. For several years, he ferried them to a warehouse, cataloguing them, boxes and boxes, looking and thinking. “I knew I wanted to photograph them,” Kiefer told me, “but for a long time, I wasn’t sure how. A friend’s suggestion to depict them in the Sonoran landscape felt too heavy-handed.” Kiefer, whose artistic heroes include Walker Evans, was inclined to a straightforward approach. Instinctively, he began placing arrangements of similar objects against different colored backgrounds. Photographed collectively or singly, the compositions are graphically appealing. Then you draw close. The hopefulness of so many makeup compacts. The handwritten inscriptions in those Bibles. The Mötley Crüe card tucked in a wallet. The dirt and sweat stains on a T-shirt lettered “Blood Donor U.S.A.”

Kiefer’s photographs of seized shoelaces and gloves disturbingly reminded me of exhibitions of shoes and gloves taken from Holocaust victims at Auschwitz. Kiefer was right to photograph these items simply. Within them is the mingled terror and desperation and hope embedded in the journeys of their unknown owners. (Eventually, he hopes an institution will collect these historical documents.) In 2014, Kiefer quit his job to begin photographing the items full-time, a process many years in the making. “I see them as sacred,” he said.

Leaving the exhibition, I again passed the wall of Mexican folk retablos near the entrance. In the nineteenth century, works like these were common in central Mexico. Here, they are shown in low light, as innocuous as they must have been in their original homes, talismans and guardians of the way in—and of the way out.

El Sueño: Tom Kiefer, Alejandro Cartagena, and a Selection of Mexican Folk Retablos is on view at Etherton Gallery, Tucson, Arizona, through February 6, 2021.