An exhibit displays the striking faces of immigrants beyond the impersonal crowds of strangers

Written by Irene Archos

Carol Crawford’s “Dreamscapes,” on view at Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City, is riveting for the viewer. Upon entering the exhibit space, one is briefly disoriented by the mirror fence. Faced with one’s reflection between bars, the viewer does a double take: am I on the inside or the outside of the wall, the cage, the threshold? The exhibit starts with a disorienting experience to evoke the liminal space of ambiguity that many immigrants, refugees and migrants feel when they migrate, whether voluntarily or not, to a new land far from home.  

Thanks to a grant from the Queens Council of the Arts, Crawford selected archival photographs from the public domain, including newspapers and internet archives, magnifying them to life-size and slightly larger and adding pastel and charcoal colors.  The effect is gripping. A monumental movement of humanity sweeps across the exhibit space in all its vulnerability, anxiety, and urgency. The photos feature groups from across cultures and historical eras. They seem to stare you in the eye saying, “I am not dead. I am not buried within the pages of an old textbook. I am here. Right now.”  The effect of using photography printed on cotton rag papers—some collaged—with colored pastels, is that the past is brought into the present.  

The viewer moves from  Mexican women holding their children, to Kurds huddled behind barbed wires, to Polish Jews waiting for the train to take them to the death camps, to Syrian families wading through the sea while clutching suitcases and parcels overhead, to Rohingya Muslims scrambling for lifeboats.he viewer is not a passive onlooker, but an active witness to the plight of millions of refugees who have trekked over the landscape of history. And why? For a dream. For even a figment of a dream that somewhere lies a place that is safer, healthier, more abundant than home.  As William Faulkner said, “History is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.” That was my experience of “Dreamscapes.”  

Carol Crawford grew up in a homogeneously American city of Buffalo in the ‘50s.  From a very young age, she had an affinity for the “Other.” The affinity for the “Other” extended into her doctorate degree at the University of Buffalo, where she was one of a few researchers who majored in African art. She chose to study African masks from a particular region in Nigeria, a genre that was both obscure and novel at that time.  

It is this life-long fascination with the “Other” that appears starkly in Dreamscapes. The process of creating the figures was “very difficult,” she confesses, especially since she was involved in a car accident that totaled her car and left her with a limp and lingering PTSD that manifested in nightmares and insomnia. She started the artistic process by scouring the web for common-sourced images of refugees, most of which were three to four inches in area .  She spent an average of four to six hours a day looking at the faces and movements of thousands of refugees throughout history. She then selected images that had high resolution and also spoke to her. “By magnifying these photos into life size or larger I am attempting to build empathy on the viewer’s part and for the impact they would have,” Crawford says. She printed the photographs on cotton rag paper which she sometimes collaged into other papers. She then artistically extended the figures in the photographs by adding pastels and compressed charcoal.  The subjects span a century, from Holocaust victims of WW2 to the present day stateless Rohingya of Bangladesh and Myanmar; their journeys take place everywhere from the US-Mexico border to the desperate water crossings made by many Syrian and North African families. 

“The idea was inspired by a common experience of confronting an impersonal crowd of strangers, and suddenly noticing striking faces that tell a personal story,”Crawford says.
Through the process, Crawford could not help but realize how “fortunate we are here even with all our political polarizations; the US is the only country in the world that embraces immigrants.”  With that said, she calls out the times in our nation’s history and present time when immigrants have not been welcome: when she was five or six with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the instinctive chill that the country was heading for war; the refusal to allow a ship of Jewish immigrant children to harbor; and the current administration’s aggressive stance on immigration. In a previous exhibit, Dichotomies, at Chelsea’s Atlantic Gallery, she included children in cages to make that point.  
Crawford says artists are the litmus paper of their societies, picking up the cues and feelings of the zeitgeist, transforming them through their respective mediums and displaying them back to them. The issues of immigration, mass movements, refugees, and the “Other”—these have resonated in Crawford since childhood. “I suppose because I really care that makes me a bit of an oddball,” Crawford says. “But,” she adds, “if you are human, you should care.”