Artist-in-Residence: Iole Alessandrini

Spring 2017

For her residency, Iole Alessandrini created an interactive installation featuring light lasers and a permeable wall visitors will have the opportunity to walk through. Alessandrini’s first experience of the Inscape building was as an immigrant being processed through the INS. She writes: “The INS building and its history have become a poignant memory for me. In it, in 1998, I received my Green Card or permanent United States residency. In 2008, in the USCIS (US Citizen and Immigration Services) in Tukwila I became a naturalized U.S. citizen. And now, in 2017 at Inscape I have been honored to be the first artist in residence. Unlike many of my light installations, which are abstract/non-representational, for the Inscape project I will install a green laser-plane to represent a luminous “wall” that divides the room in two halves. In such a space I invite people to physically cross the wall as an action of protest against any wall, built or intended to be built, between nations. With a camera I will take pictures of people in the green laser light of each crossing. Nobody is detained.”