Archipelagoes (2019), 2019panel 16B
Archival pigment print
20 × 16 in.
Edition 1 of 3
In this panel of Carrie Yamaoka’s Archipelagoes, a list of names—Wallkill, Wildwood, Willow River, Winnebago, Woodland—emerges against a blurred gray background. Evoking rivers, forests, or pastoral places, these are also the names of prisons and detention centers. Here, as throughout the cycle, language is both anchor and veil: it confers a sense of place while masking histories of confinement and dispossession. Yamaoka’s digital re-iteration of the analogue series underscores this tension. Just as “the U.S. government moves material from one deployment or detention camp, repurposes it, and later places it in another site,” so too has Archipelagoes shifted across media, with each version refracting its subject anew. The abecedarium structure—partial, interrupted, and incomplete—mirrors the fragmentation of history itself. In its very naming, Archipelagoes signals the political geography of separation, a chain of isolated yet interconnected sites of power. Panel 16B crystallizes the cycle’s arc: an archipelago of words and silences where memory, exposure, and erasure continually reconfigure the American landscape.Inquire