ALIEN NATION

DARLINGS X Puzzle Art Garage. Sydney. October 2023.

ABOUT ALIEN NATION

Dobrilaio. Welcome. This exhibition make up the first works in a subnarrative of my ongoing myth Song of @Merica, a saga that chronicles the glorious rise of Merica, the land of liberty, and its fall at the hands of King Vir.us, a technopathogenic harbinger of the consumption of all things. The “artifacts” in the exhibition come from the Wydeshis, otherworldly immigrants who leave their dying homeworld for Merica.  The exhibition chronicles the myriad of experiences faced by the Wydeshis — experiences not dissimilar to the patterns of migration that shape the liberal mythologies and xenophobic fantasies of developed nations.

The word “Wydesh” (Waidesh/外aıдエш) is a linguistic hybrid that encapsulates the simultaneous bigotry and intra-camaraderie of people who are deemed “alien” and other. Many linguistic, cultural, and liturgical allusions swim together in this esoteric narrative, which derives from my New York City upbringing amongst diverse peoples and all our interlinking forms of expression. Unlike my usual maximalism, I’ve stripped down this show to pull focus, placing these ”artifacts” to beckon you into “face to face” conversations with experiences often lost in the chasms of national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. Each artifact in Alien Nation serves as a facet of the immigrant stories I’ve known my whole life or experienced myself. The painting Meriki Reve tells the tale of the Wydeshi exodus, but it is stylistically linked to the community murals and graffiti I grew up around. Meanwhile each Wydeshi “mask” is made out of my own immigration documents and the bureaucratic paperwork accumulated over the nearly four years since moving to Australia.

The legend of the Wydeshis is imbued with all of the difficult feelings of national, cultural, religious, and communal limbo that I have felt, first as a child of immigrants, then as an immigration law assistant, and now as an immigrant myself. In this way, the aliens’ namesake takes on a more homonymic, esoteric meaning: Why? Why do we leave? Why do we stay? Why do we so easily demarcate between here and there, us vs. them? In these works I have tried to embed these questions, and call out to all others who have been a stranger in a strange land.

Gratixa. Thank you.