August 23-October 13, 2024
Kaplan Gallery

Curator’s Statement

Los Extranjeros (The Foreigners) is an immersive solo exhibition by Baltimore-based artist, illustrator, and designer TLaloC. The multi-sensory exhibition, which features interwoven sights, sounds, and scents, centers around the perceptions, sentiments, and resulting interactions with what the viewer might categorize as foreign, and takes a winding, adventurous road towards revealing that our most basic understanding of the relationship between a person and a place in fact mirrors our own view of the world.

Using stereotypically dystopian elements such as industrial waste and transforming VisArts’ Kaplan Gallery into an Borgesian labyrinth that shifts the viewer’s gears into trying to navigate an eerie space, TLaloC seeks to explore visual and perceptual discomfort that seeks to echo the deepest insecurities a foreigner might feel in a new place and harkens to a sociopolitical reality many immigrants, especially of the global majority, might feel daily.

The interpretation of the word “alien,” which the United States government uses to describe non-citizens, is central to the exhibition: humanoid figures wearing bespoke headdresses and removed from the visitor’s path via chain-link fence, highlight the divisive nature of the word.

However, in the world that TLaloC creates, there are silver linings: through the fog, over the fences, and in the fauna in the gallery is a quiet welcome, thus begging the question, is protection necessary? Breaking the more stereotypical links between signs of danger and anarchy and the threats they might represent and thus making physical barriers dispensable, TLaloC instead asks the viewer to be present with the discomfort they might feel and notice the unlikely havens they may find just at the edge of recognizability – from a set of piano strings to the artist’s bespoke neon symbols that may as well be an alphabet.

Inspired by the signs and scripts of universal cultures, TLaloC highlights that understanding is not always necessary to feel comfort in the presence of someone or something new.

Through a collaboration with composer and musician Miguel Soto, TLaloC provides an audiovisual experience that weaves together dialogues between the two artists and a group of individuals who have, at a time in their life, found themselves to be foreign to a place. The answers reveal the diverse ways the human mind navigates and adapts to the new, delivering representational and abstract accompaniments to TLaloC’s winding paths.

The audience is invited to Soto and TLaloC’s interactive performance, which will incorporate responses from immigrants, at the September 6 opening celebration.