Border Crossing: An Introduction and Poems

Border Crossings began as an idea for a photographic installation which premiered in 2002 at the Wollongong City Gallery, in Wollongong, Australia. A merging of print and filmic texts, the show worked as a meditation on migration, through images and poems that travelled between Canada and Australia, though it also moved through other landscapes, from Switzerland to Turkey. The show attempted to challenge the way photographs were typically presented as well. Many of the Canadian works of dilapidated buildings, for example, were framed using recycled Australian materials: paling fences, decomposing sleepers, and rusted metals. Australian images were surrounded by Canadian timbers, so that the frames themselves spoke about a cross-culturality, a contamination of place and space, which arguably reframed and represented the images themselves.