Documenting Border Barriers is an exhibition by Pamela Dodds that addresses the exponential rise in the building of fortified fences and walls between nations and territories to control and prevent the movement of people. The installation in Open Studio’s Project Space presents the initial prints in her continuing, comprehensive study in drypoint and relief printmaking of border barriers in the world today.

As the number of people on the move has risen in recent years, so has the building of physical barriers. People fleeing war and crisis are increasingly met with fences, walls and violence at European borders, on the USA-Mexico border, and at numerous borders worldwide.

Pamela Dodds’s work in painting and relief printmaking explores the challenges and barriers within human relationships, through narrative figure-based imagery. These nuanced portrayals of personal vulnerability are inspired by her feminist, political perspectives. In Documenting Border Barriers she turns her lens from the intimate to the global. Using the drypoint printmaking technique, where the image is scratched into the matrix then printed, this exhibition, featuring visceral portraits of barbed wire and concrete barriers accompanied by printed text descriptions, presents a sobering study of this aggressive response to human suffering and need.

Created with funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, Canada.

Pamela Dodds’s work is exhibited regularly in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the USA, and recently in Spain, Norway and the UK. She has been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships. Her work has been purchased for collections such as Capital One Bank, Ontario, Boston Public Library, MA, Purdue University, IL and Cleveland Museum of Art, OH. Recent solo exhibitions include Undertow at Centre 3, Hamilton (virtual) and Something I want to Tell You in Cleveland, Ohio.

More information here: https://openstudio.ca/exhibition/documenting-border-barriers/

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