Author Description

"Harbage Page's exhibition focuses primarily on her U.S.-Mexico Border Project, a three-part series that has held her attention for more than fifteen years. The project includes her Anti-Archive of Trauma on the U.S.-Mexico Border, comprised of approximately 1,000 found objects such as shoes, religious items, and passports left behind by border crossers. The project also includes more than 30,000 photographic images Harbage Page has taken of the immediate border area along the Rio Grande in Texas. Many of the images depict the paths that refugees walk; over time, her images have shown the increased militarization of the area. Lastly, Harbage Page has used her own body in more than fifteen site-specific actions and interventions in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas as a way of speaking to more personal conversations around representation and the privilege that Harbage Page, as a white academic holds, has as she walks, canoes, and bikes along and across the border--a place where many others cannot walk safely. The project illuminates a history of continuing trauma caused by bordering practices in the Rio Grande Valley. The focus on archives asks the viewer to consider how they shape our histories, whose narratives get included, and whose narratives get left out or abandoned."--Davidson College Art Galleries.