Convoy (1999)
Installation Statement (Straightforward)
Convoy (1999)
Convoy began with a road trip I took in 1999 through California and the Southwest. During the trip, I collected toy figures and vehicles from thrift shops and swap meets, photographed meals, and recorded video using a skateboard-mounted camera to capture a low, moving perspective of the terrain.
In the gallery, these elements form a convoy that moves slowly across the floor each day until it disappears. The space transforms into an environment featuring billboards, stacks of video monitors, and inflatable swimming pools representing terrestrial bodies of water. At each end of the gallery, “border crossings” serve as entry and exit points . Pro-wrestler action figures perform spins on skateboards across the pools accompanying the migration.
The documentation of every meal I consumed on the trip from New Orleans to the West Coast and back provides a parallel narrative of the journey, highlighting both geography and lived experience.
Background and Influences
Living near the U.S.–Mexico border in Southern California, I am immersed in a culture shaped by skateboarding and surfing alongside migration and movement. Migration is not just a theme but a part of everyday life here. My travels between New Orleans and California were initially an open-ended exploration, focused on gathering visual and material elements. Later, these collections were framed within a broader commentary on borders and movement.
The humor present in Convoy functions as a critical device. By exaggerating scale and animating plastic figures, the installation draws attention to how complex issues like migration and border control are often simplified or turned into spectacle. These playful elements encourage viewers to reconsider how these realities are presented and perceived.
Installation artists such as Bill Viola have influenced my interest in time and slow movement, while the Dadaists provided inspiration through their use of absurdity and found objects to critique social and political issues. Ultimately, Convoy is a meditation on movement—personal, political, and performative—expressed through a miniature world that points to larger realities.
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Installation Statement (Academic)
Convoy (1999) is a time-based installation that explores themes of migration, consumption, border politics, and vernacular culture in the American Southwest. Developed in response to a road trip undertaken in 1999 through California and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, the work engages with found materials, performative objects, and spatial interventions to evoke the layered experience of travel and transit in a culturally hybridized landscape.
The installation follows a set of conceptual and procedural constraints:
Kinetic Videography: Terrain was documented using a video camera mounted on a skateboard affixed to an inverted tripod, creating a low-angle, mobile perspective akin to that of a toy vehicle. This approach disrupts conventional landscape imagery by simulating the viewpoint of objects in motion rather than human observers.
Toy Convoy Migration: A procession of action figures and miniature vehicles, all collected spontaneously throughout the journey, were staged to move across the gallery floor incrementally each day. This slow progression created a durational narrative of migration that culminated in the convoy’s disappearance on the final day of the exhibition.
Reconstructed Symbolic Landscape: The gallery was transformed into an immersive environment that referenced roadside iconography and cross-cultural markers. Elements included:
Simulated billboards and fast food menus functioning as signifiers of consumer culture.
Swimming pools representing displaced bodies of water—both recreational and territorial.
Constructed “border crossings” positioned at opposing ends of the space, acting as entry and exit points.
Performative Interventions: Pro-wrestler action figures emerged cyclically from the border zones mounted on skateboards, and performed choreographed 360-degree spins over the pools. These stylized movements offered a hybrid gesture—part athletic spectacle, part ritual crossing—that underscored the absurdity and spectacle embedded in representations of movement and surveillance.
Gastro-Documentary Archive: A photographic index of every meal consumed during the trip—from New Orleans to the Pacific Coast and back—was displayed as a parallel narrative. These images function as markers of temporality, geography, and bodily sustenance, reinforcing the corporeal reality of the journey alongside its symbolic structure.
Materials and Influences
Convoy draws from the cultural terrain of Southern California, where surf, skate, and border culture overlap. I’ve spent years living near the U.S.–Mexico border and traveling through Mexico, and that experience — of being surrounded by the constant flow of people and commerce — informs the conceptual structure of the work. Migration isn’t a backdrop here; it’s the environment. The installation doesn’t attempt to represent it directly, but instead reflects on how it is mediated, trivialized, or aestheticized in everyday life.
In contrast, my travels between New Orleans and California were open-ended, exploratory journeys. I treated them as a kind of mobile fieldwork — a way to collect visual fragments, food experiences and roadside culture. These travels were not themselves political, but the materials gathered during them were later re-contextualized within a more critical frame.
The humor in Convoy isn’t incidental or purely playful — it functions as a critical tool. By exaggerating scale, animating border crossings with plastic wrestlers, or turning swimming pools into stand-ins for bodies of water, the installation draws attention to the way serious issues like migration and surveillance are often reduced to spectacle. These humorous elements invite viewers in, but also provoke reflection on how easily we consume and overlook complex realities.
The work is influenced by artists like Bill Viola, whose explorations of time and transformation shaped my approach to slow movement and video; and by the Dadaists, whose use of absurdity, satire, and found materials offered a language for critique. Ultimately, Convoy is a meditation on movement — personal, political, and performative — staged in miniature, temporal, reflecting outward.
