Aesthetics of Crossing: Land Ports of Entry / Citizenship by Design
An Exhibition by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects and Alan Michelson / Kadambari Baxi and Irene Cheng

OPENING RECEPTION
Wednesday, July 1, 2009, 6:30–8:30pm

EXHIBITION
July 1–31, 2009, Mon–Fri 10am–6pm

AESTHETICS OF CROSSING pairs two projects that examine border crossing points and the individuals who pass through them. Land Ports of Entry by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects and artist Alan Michelson highlights the architecture of surveillance and openness in two recently built US border stations. Citizenship by Design by Kadambari Baxi and Irene Cheng reimagines the design of passports, international regulations, and other artifacts that subliminally shape individuals’ statuses. One project is architectural, concrete, and real; the other is graphic, ephemeral, and narrative. Both provoke viewers to reconsider the aesthetic dimensions of how nation-states regulate individuals’ movements and identities.

Land Ports of Entry features Smith-Miller + Hawkinson’s designs for two border stations that facilitate the inspection and control of passenger and commercial vehicles traversing the border between the United States and Canada. As both ceremonial gateways and sites of surveillance and regulation, the ports must convey a sense of openness as well as security. The architects use aesthetics—particularly material effects of transparency, translucency, and opacity—to negotiate the contradictions of the program and to gesture towards the buildings’ equivocal, post-9/11 geopolitical landscape.

Citizenship by Design is a public art project by Kadambari Baxi and Irene Cheng that raises questions about citizenship in a globalized age. The project inspects artifacts such as international passports, identification technologies, and regulations regarding naturalization and travel. By highlighting the aesthetics of these objects and rules, and by remixing their graphic elements into multinational hybrids, the project calls attention to the ways that citizenship is designed—and the ways it might be reimagined in an era of proliferating global crossings.