The idea to highlight the people I met while on these trips came about on the long ride home from Mexico. While stuck at a standstill on a highway in Texas for two hours in the early morning hours, a friend and I chatted about our passions in life. I had a hard time verbalizing what I thought I was passionate about - honestly I was not sure if I knew - but the one thing I was able to get out was the fact that if I could simply spend my life working with people like those whom we had just left, my life would be a good one. Later on that day, just an hour and a half outside of home, we began our "debriefing session" (a time of thought-provoking questions to help us process what we just experienced over the past week). The last question of he conversation was "If we were to build a wall of hope in the lower chapel, what image would you add?" After listening to everyone's answers and being reminded of how much hope there was in such a dark place, I began processing the concept of following through with this idea to build a wall of hope.
The idea slowly transformed throughout the semester, but the focus of these people and places they live stayed the same. I wanted to highlight the people who made an impact on my life but also draw attention to some of the overlooked places of our world. The people of Reynosa live in a squatter's village on a garbage dump where if the government suddenly decides they cannot live there anymore, they have to pick up an leave with no place to go. They live each day on the boarder of Mexico and the United States - the boarder of possibility - but are not allowed to cross that line. And yet, they still find the joy in life.
The same goes for the people of New Orleans, especially in the Ninth Ward. Hurricane Katrina hit five years ago, and even though the richer parts of New Orleans have been restored, there are places that have not been touched. On our trip, we visited an apartment complex of low-income housing. Nothing had been touched since Katrina. It was if it had been frozen in time - clothes strewn about, a teddy bear on the floor, dishes still in the sink - it is a sight i will never forget. I could not help but wonder why anyone would bother coming back to this place, why would they want to see their home and all their belongings destroyed by floodwaters as high as the power lines? One man we worked with told us that was just it, it is home and there truly is no place like home.
On the Rosebud Reservation, there are not the visual cues of darkness like the garbage dump of the squatter's village or the devastation brought on by a hurricane, but the darkness is still there. It is in the homes. Ideal, South Dakota sounds like a pleasant place. and in all honesty, the street of twelve houses, a church, and a post office looks like any small, mid-western town, but there are so many things going on behind those closed doors. The children we work with in Rosebud are beaten and abused, some are not given a full meal for weeks, and many are born to alcoholic and drug abusive parents and therefore suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome. But the smiles on their faces and the light in their eyes when they see us drive up in in our fifteen-passenger van always remind me that they know the hope and love of God.
These places were each displayed in a different self-titled piece in my show and the people that were of significance to me were portrayed through objects paced in mason jars. The best way I remember things, events, people, what have you, is through making a connection to an object. The idea of storing these objects in mason jars as a way of preserving their memory as well as creating a portrait of the person came about from a little girl in Mexico named Maria. One day while working on the houses in the squatter's village, Maria was sitting amongst our sweatshirts and water bottles with the saddest look in her eyes. Someone told me it was probably because the college student she had played with the day before was at a different site. I did my best to cheer her up, offered to play different games, basically saying as much as I could with only one semester of Spanish under my belt, but it ended up that she just wanted me to hold her. So I did - for two hours I held this little girl in my arms while talking to others who lived in the village. After lunch she came back to find me and show me her prized possession - a jar of cockroaches. She carried this jar around with her everywhere - it was like they were her pets, in fact, she even cried when one ran away. But the image of that jar stuck with me and became the start to my project.
