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Light of our faith, before thy shrine we kneel;
Print on our minds the stamp of what we seal.
Lands we have served, forever turn their backs;
Conquest seems far, but we will scale the tracks
– George H. Martin, Barbados, 1913, carpenter’s apprentice, culvert worker, track layer
Memory, migration, and the quiet violence of empire.
Rooted in Jacqueline Arias’ research on the Panama Canal Zone, this body of work weaves historical testimony, personal memory, and material gestures to acknowledge the West Indies laborers who built the Panama Canal. As a Costa Rican adoptee once living on the Atlantic side of the isthmus, Arias’ connection to the land and her embodied memory weaves a collective narrative–one shaped by displacement, labor, and imperial design.
Graphic collage work, drawn from archival documentation of the canal’s construction, offers visual testimony–fragments that affirm lives lived at the margins of empire. A video sculpture, animated by AI and fed with these same archival fragments, flickers between presence and disappearance–machine memory searching for the truth inscribed on the body through toil.
Throughout the gallery, maritime knots and pulleys hang in tension. These small rope sculptures mark the wretched toll of tropical disease, evoking a body’s struggle against heat, disease, and erasure. Rope, once an instrument of control, becomes here a line of witness–recoded by hand and intention. A Lived Experience is both an archive and altar. It holds both grief and survival, remembering the lives that endured–and honoring those that were lost.
Read the review in DisCerning Eye.
Jacqueline Arias was born in Costa Rica and raised in southern Ohio. This varied geographical and cultural history has inspired a body of work that combines experimental video, sculpture, new media practices, data visualizations and AI technologies to construct alternative historiographies that address Latinx geopolitical issues around migration and family separation.
Arias is an independent director of a feature length documentary film, Imaginary Mothers that was screened at the 2017 Golden Door International Film Festival and at the Adoption Initiative 2018 biennial conference. In 2018, Arias was awarded a seed grant from Women In Film and Video DC.
Arias has been invited to speak about her work and activism at Nogales Museum, Mexico and Loyola University, Maryland. In 2022, Jacqueline was awarded a Border Lab Graduate Fellowship from the Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona. Her work was recently selected for the 2024 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art.
Arias holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art/Photography, Video & Imaging at the University of Arizona and a BFA in Fine Art Photography from Parsons School of Design in NYC. Arias currently serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Arizona, College of Information Science.
Instagram: maya_tica
Facebook: Jacqueline Arias
A Lived Experience Price List For any artwork purchase, email M. Aragon, maragon@visartscenter.org
A Lived Experience Price List
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