Nina Vichayapai, Artist-in-Residence

Saturday, December 8, 2018, 12-6pm

For the past three months, Inscape Artist-in-Residence Nina Vichayapai has been sewing a soft sculpture installation in conversation with this building she first experienced as an immigrant. Come see the solo exhibition that will be the conclusion of her residency on Saturday December 8 from 12-6pm during our semiannual Open House!

“Permeable Moment is an installation intended to suspend in time a moment of permeability in the act of migration. Border areas, immigration services, and the buildings designed to moderate the flow of immigrants into our country are defined by their lack of permeability for many people who they process. For those who are detained or deported a moment of permeability never comes or may be fleeting. For countless others the rules which grant them permeability are constantly shifting and frustratingly left to the discretion of higher powers.

For my family, our permeable moment came in 2003 when we received our citizenship here in the INS building. For all those who arrive in the United States with the goal of finding a home here, the journey begins with a vision which looks beyond the many barriers which obstructs the path to their dreams.

Permeable Moment represents the dissolution of the structures which act as barriers to those dreams for many. The monumental guardedness of the INS building and its physical features designed to detain, from high brick walls to fenced off windows, are reimagined as soft and impermanent ruins. Within this dreamlike space the relief of a permeable moment holds still and is offered as an idealized vision which can serve as a conceptual model for a future in which human migrations can occur without obstruction.”

– Nina Vichayapai