UPCOMING CONVERSATION

Artist Talk with Hannah Smith Allen

Please join BAXTER ST 2025 Mid-Career Open Call Recipient Hannah Smith Allen, on Saturday, June 6th at 4 PM at 154 Ludlow Street, for an artist talk exploring the proceses and themes that make up her solo exhibition, On Broken Ground.

On Broken Ground includes a selection of still photographs, unique screen prints, collage, and a video installation shown alongside Borderlands, an accordion book published by Visual Studies Workshop Press in 2021. Spanning recent works along with those made during Donald Trump’s first presidency, the exhibition explores the American landscape as a site of both possibility and imposed limitations.

This project originated in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, when Allen began studying Google Earth to examine the wall separating California from Mexico. Throughout her searches, she noticed that glitches in the mapping software produced digital distortions in the border wall’s structure. These anomalies appeared as if the wall were opening up or breaking apart and became powerful metaphors for the fragility of the border and the narratives through which the United States constructs its history. After discovering these anomalies, Allen decided to make three physical trips to the U.S.–Mexico border to photograph the landscape firsthand.

Most recently, Allen created a new series of collages that combines screen prints and original photographs in a technique that echoes the flat, patchwork panels of the border wall and renders the American terrain fractured and obstructed; landscapes rupture and split, not only by way of physical barriers but through the weight of their symbolic charge. In dialogue with her collaged landscapes, several new screen prints juxtapose the border landscape with imagery from President Trump’s 250th Anniversary military parade, showcasing the underlying tension between the pageantry of power and the stillness of the desert.

The exhibition also features a new iteration of Allen’s video installation, Dream States, which she originally exhibited in 2025. In this version, stop-motion animations that the artist originally captured via Google Earth are projected onto target stands and newspaper clippings. These hallucinatory sequences depict the sky between the United States and Mexico alongside digital revelations of a broken border wall.