Hannah Smith Allen: Borderlands
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Hannah Smith Allen will share images and text from “Borderlands,” a limited edition accordion book from the VSW Press that documents her travels, both real and virtual, at the U.S. southern border.
After the 2016 US presidential election, Hannah Smith Allen began visiting Google Earth to study the wall that separates California from Mexico. She noticed that glitches in the mapping software allow users to slip through the wall into another nation’s territory. Immediately, she began to video record her Google Earth travels. The digital aberrations of the collapsing wall inspired her to make three physical trips to the US Southern border to photograph the landscape.
In Adelphi’s Swirbul Gallery, Allen will exhibit Borderlands, an accordion fold book/sculptural form (VSW Press, 2021) that is made from over 500 photographs that she shot along the physical border as well as video stills that she extracted from Google Earth. A text weaves through the nearly 200-inch-wide pieces making for “A Physical and Virtual Index of Numbers, Codes, and Crossings (in no particular order).”