Installations

Lost and Found: Remnants of a Desert Passage

Through image and object, Maeve Hickey invokes the epic movement of Mexican migrants through the Sonoran Desert: the hopeful, fragile, and sometimes tragic experience of the many thousands who cross the border seeking a new life in the United States. In the artist's black and white photographs, taken in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, we encounter the terrible beauty of the desert they traverse. We also discover the traces of their passage in the roads and paths worn by blistered feet in the indifferent sands, and in the objects shed one after another along the way, until little remains beyond hope and will. Many of those objects- from baby's shoe to bicycle, from toothbrush to written prayer- are gathered and re-animated by Hickey in boxed pieces that suggest the conjuncture of dreams. Intensely personal, these images and objects are of course traces of a profoundly collective experience, powerfully conveyed in Maeve Hickey's complex but evocative and deeply moving installation. - Lawrence J. Taylor

"A touching exhibit …Hickey’s sensitive interpretation of the migrants’ desert trash...[is] timely and necessary...[it] puts a human face on an unfolding human tragedy that transcends national and international immigration politics and border enforcement." - Zita Arocha, El Paso Times, 11/18/2004

"Is it an art installation or an altar? Here a museum quality display case holds, among other objects, the following: empty plastic water jugs, a backpack, a baby bottle, soap, Colgate toothpaste, a hair brush, a sardine can, a sock, and used Aeromexico tickets..." - Demetria Martinez, National Catholic Reporter, 8/1/2002