Exhibition Statement
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.