“powerful…show… by…Janet Goldner on immigration.” Holland Cotter, NEW YORK TIMES, April 21, 2016….. & featured in NYArts .
Fences & Neighbors is Janet Goldner’s mixed media installation inspired by her research trip to Arizona in 2014. A woven barbed wire fence divides the gallery. On the far side is a projected video of migrants’ stories that viewers can see through the fence. Photographs and texts about the migrants’ treacherous journey are layered on both sides of the space.
As the fever pitch around migration mounted in 2014, Goldner wanted to go see for herself. Working with the Tucson Arts Brigade and the US Department of Arts and Culture, she spent a week on and around the border. The fence to the sky separating Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora, made of surplus military steel from the runways in Iraq, was particularly impressive and disturbing.
Migration is a recurring theme for Goldner. Her large-scale public sculpture, Most of Us Are Immigrants was installed in Sara Roosevelt Park in the late 1990’s. It is now in the collection of the Islip Museum on Long Island.
