IMMIGRATION LAW LIBRARY

Becraft’s work, the Immigration Law Library, is conceptually rigorous and visually tactile.

Becraft is interested in the notion that “language is oppression” (Michael Foucault) and is developed to allow only those people who speak it not to be oppressed. Becraft is an Anglo Saxon male and an immigration lawyer and implicates himself in the work. Becraft is also mindful of the “traces” (Jacques Derrida) that his ethnic background leaves in the text, created primarily by Anglo Saxon lawmakers; the deposits left by history, politics or philosophy. He is aware that a lawyer is “not merely a legal technician hire to serve the client, but also a part of the legal community and a crucial participant in the maintenance and formation of the legal institutions and laws” that delivers systematic injustice. (Portraits of Resistance: Lawyer Responses to Unjust Proceedings by Alexandra Lahav; UCLA Law Review) The text is also a border that imposes an invisible wall with the same enforcement effects as an armed border patrol agent, a fence or a river, without the negative attention.

Finally, the inclinations behind border making and aesthetic principles of abstraction are powered by the same pursuit of spatial order. Both abstract painting and border making rely on the assumption that absolute space (the “free” space of the canvas and geography, unresolved and uncontested) is codified through its transformation to an abstract space of containment and order. The result implies that our cognition of space, and the process of its utilization, forms parallel basis of visual and political consciousness.

immigration law library, 2015, 96" x 120", paper on canvas

immigration law library, installation view, carecen benefit exhibition, 2015

immigration law library (detail)

immigration law library, 2015, 96" x 120", paper on canvas

immigration law library, installation view, carecen benefit exhibition, 2015

immigration law library (detail)

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