During the spring and summer of 2006, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s experimental branch, LACMA Lab, ran a show titled “Consider This” which invited the six artists represented, and subsequently the public, to consider our present social and cultural climate. With these broad parameters one artist, Margaret Honda, created a piece titled “Hide Out.” Using wood and various blue patterned cloth, she constructed a large clubhouse viewers circled, peering through peepholes and into the snarling mouth or startled stare of taxidermied animals on loan from the Natural History Museum. Viewers were then welcome to build their own clubhouses from textiles and pillows adjacent to the larger work.
Honda’s piece speaks to the idea of invisibility and what this does to individuals, communities and space. The animals in her clubhouse (or, rather, fortress) are contained and hidden, their presence and actions visible only when the viewer chooses to peek into their “habitat ”. The views offer only a limited perspective of the animal and the space they inhabit. This concept of invisibility is not new to our social and cultural climate but it is especially topical in regards to the debate of undocumented workers in the United States.
Undocumented workers are an existing part of U.S. society contributing to our social conscious, our work force, and our communities. Whether an individual or groups are for or against their presence in this country, theirs is a presence that is active and can’t be ignored. People working without papers in the U.S., whether seasonally or with an intent to stay, are slotted in a category of invisibility by the circumstance of their lives. With a necessity to remain out of the eye of the law, or of citizens who think they are the law, coupled with marginalized occupations available to them, undocumented workers generally occupy jobs that are behind-the-scenes. Chefs and dishwashers in restaurant kitchens, janitors with night shifts, field workers in rural farms, day laborers working with private contractors in construction or landscaping, nannies in private houses or secluded parks all have little interaction with the general public.
At the end of the day there is a similar condition of invisibility surrounding the community a worker returns to. Many neighborhoods are comprised of families of undocumented workers, of families with an undocumented worker living with them, or houses or apartments where many people, mainly men, live, unrelated to each other but sharing a common space, probably the same language, and a similar position as being undocumented. The condition of invisibility is one create both by the people living within it and those without it. It is a choice all individuals and communities, admittedly with much difficulty, can choose to transcend.
