Archipelagoes (2019), 2019panel 8
Archival pigment print
20 × 16 in.
Edition 2 of 3
Carrie Yamaoka’s Archipelagoes (2019) is a 23-panel cycle that reconsiders an earlier analogue series of 18 photograms made between 1991–94 as an incomplete abecedarium of sequestered American sites—“prisons, hospitals, concentration camps—functioning as both word and image.” The new works, printed digitally from the original set and supplemented with five contemporary panels, are one generation removed, both in time and in relation to material. This migration from analogue to digital mirrors the shifting purposes of the very sites the series names. In this panel, the words Heart Mountain appear across a softly clouded ground, invoking the WWII incarceration camp in Wyoming where over 14,000 Japanese Americans were detained. As the artist has observed, there are “celebrated sites such as Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls,” and there are others “mostly hidden from our view.” The very title Archipelagoes underscores the political implications of fragmentation, suggesting a chain of disconnected sites linked by histories of exclusion and state power. Yamaoka’s work anchors this hidden history in language while simultaneously allowing it to drift into abstraction.Inquire