Strategies for the evasion of capture
2022
installation of sculptural and photographic works with archival objects, video, and assemblage
ASU West Gallery at Arizona State University, New College
Glendale, AZ
Tucked away in the hillsides of the Cordillera region in the Philippine island of Luzon is the elusive low-flying bird known to scientists as Turnix worcesteri (Worcester's buttonquail) or pugo to locals. Likely running among the tall grass fields that can reach up to 8-feet tall, pugo have remained cryptic birds for well over a century, hidden behind the neutral beige tones of the rolling hills and rice paddies scattered across the mountains of the Northern Island. Labeled as "data deficient" by an international group of conservationists, they received their name after Dean C. Worcester, prominent zoologist and US public official to serve as an upper-level Secretary during US colonization of the Philippines. Despite Worcester's ability to maintain the photographic archive of Indigenous peoples of the Philippines, pugos have consistently remained obscure from photographic capture while alive. Metaphorically, or possibly actually, pugos have evaded the violence of colonial photography with their capacity to hide in plain sight, as if their existence continues to refuse the adverse effects of benevolent assimilation introduced in the early 20th century. While their inability to be sighted continues to mark their rarity, pugos’ elusive nature poetically opens the possibilities of other realities, of other existences, or of different ways of being that are not reliant on colonial contact.
Through sculpture, photographs, and video installations, this work ruminates on the productive sites of illegibility and disclarity. Drawn from archival television news footage, interviews with prominent zoologists, and historical ephemera, the works in this exhibition thus gesture to contemporary discourses around visibility and the tensions embedded in surveillance cultures while indexing the fraught conditions of capture, collections, and identification.