LAND ESCAPE
Multimedia Installation: Multichannel video, single-channel audio, chiffon fabric, barbed wire, wood
30 minutes
60 x 35 x 14 feet / 1828 x 1067 x 427 cm
2019
Land Escape is a poignant exploration of human migration and movement. The travelers in this installation are caught in a mirage, disoriented by the uprooting, the boundaries, and the passage without fixed ends. The absurdity of their conditions is reflected in the surreal landscape created by projected video, chiffon fabric, and barbed wire, which breaks through the confines of the flat image to invade the shared space between viewer and art.
The animal and human masks worn by the travelers symbolize humanity's innate drive to move, explore, and search for a better life. However, in a world where borders are violently enforced, this natural drive is obstructed by strange new lines, and never quite locks back into place. The migrants in Land Escape experience a breakdown of the natural order, and their journey leads them back to the beginning, leaving no trace of their transit except the eternal looping of their video universe.
Only when the travelers pause for a moment can we catch a glimpse of the human underneath the mask. These are not just tricks of light, but real people with old bodies bent by age and young bodies in pigtails, all compelled to move forward and unable to stop for long. In their pause, they contemplate their journey and understand the unending nature of their path. Land Escape is a thought-provoking artwork that challenges us to reflect on our shared human experience of movement and migration in an increasingly divided world.
EXHIBITIONS
SOUTH FLORIDA CULTURAL CONSORTIUM
Curated by Amy Galpin, PhD
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
September 5 - October 20, 2019
Displacement
The notion of displacement figures prominently in Edison Peñafiel’s physically engulfing installations. Multiple projections and barbed wire surround the space. A visitor can consider their physical relationship to the masked figures, emoting an element of macabre, that move through the space. The subjects march, they process, but not for ceremonial purposes. Their migration is forced, and their actions evoke broad notions of displacement but also, most specifically, exile, exploitation, and prejudice. Born in Ecuador the artist has witnessed economic and political instability in South America. The artist recognizes the correlation between instability and migration and creates works that resonate with universal meanings as millions of people across the globe experience displacement.
Peñafiel’s Land Escape was recently produced at 100 W. Corsicana in Corsicana, Texas. Kyle Hobratschk, founder of the artist residency in Corsicana, writes “Land Escape pushed 100 West Corsicana’s third floor studio in directions no other artist in this program has considered so deeply, stringing connections back to the nineteenth century theatrical origins of this residency building as an independent Order of the Odd Fellows Lodge, and doubling the utility of this space for both production and uncompromised exhibition platform. The window-blackened room evaporates the dimension of our 3rd floor studio into timeless and timely content we are now pleased to see travel across state lines.” As Hobratschk infers, Land Escape makes its Miami debut in this exhibition.
Excerpt of writing by Amy Galpin, PhD.
2019 South Florida Cultural Consortium
REENACTMENTS OF A PERPETUAL CYCLE
100 W Corsicana, TX
May 25 - August 3, 2019
Finite Bodies In Infinite Time
… human movement and presence in the landscape manifests itself through the restless effort to pin down a sense of the place, Edison Peñafiel is more interested in the literal movement of bodies through space. His complex installation of video projections and collaged sound references recurrent patterns of human migrations. Looped in an endless procession, absurd, yet highly sympathetic characters trudge across an animated landscape. The terrain slowly shifts between grassland, ocean, desert, and mountain range, only for the travelers to appear back where they started again, looping back on an eternal journey to nowhere. Though Peñafiel’s masked characters continually traverse the landscapes they encounter, they leave no visible index of their passage, and as such, they seem doomed to repeat themselves again and again. At the same time, the identity of the characters remains temporally and culturally ambiguous—some seem without gender or without age. Papier-mâché masks primarily from artisans in Peñafiel’s native Ecuador, and unspecific costuming transform them into archetypal representatives of any diasporic population. The first wave of immigrants charts the path for the next, whose journey in reality might take a different shape, but the obstacles are largely the same. Though the characters rarely interact with each other, they seem to inherent some kind of spatial knowledge from their predecessors. There are no tentative steps—no one hesitates as solid ground transforms into water. Undoubtedly their bodies reveal their exhaustion, but each one—stooped old women and pigtailed children alike—drives onward relentlessly.
Peñafiel’s installation occupies a room in 100W once used for secret rites and performances by the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, including reenactments of Old Testament stories and the Royal Purple Degree—a highly theatrical ritual designed to gently shepherd blindfolded initiates through an elaborate mock pilgrimage to a High Priest, metaphorically representing their triumphant passage through the “journey of life.” Great pains are taken by the Order, to assure that their candidates appear triumphant and remain safe during the entire ritual, despite loaded warnings of dire troubles ahead. The pilgrims in the Royal Purple Degree, however, always complete their journey, victorious over vice and conveniently protected from the perils natural world. Peñafiel’s travelers have no oak tree of hospitality or “bright rainbow of promise” to remind them of their “covenant-keeping Father.” Though there are no provisions against rough roads or annoyingly suspended rushes on their journey, Peñafiel’s travelers appear to walk on water.
Excerpt from exhibition essay by Allison Klion for Reenactments of a Perpetual Cycle exhibition.
Land Escape is a multimedia installation produced during an artist residency at 100W Corsicana in Corsicana, TX with funds provided in part by the Navarro Council of the Arts and 100W Corsicana.
It debuted in 2019 as part of Reenactments of a Perpetual Cycle, a collaborative exhibition between artists Rachel Wolfson Smith and Edison Peñafiel.
Exibition Essay: Finite Bodies in Infinite Times by Allison Klion