The atrium of the Fine and Performing Arts Center is beginning to look like a militarized zone.
You can thank the young SIU graduate and Chicago Heights artist Luis Sahagun for that. His solo show, “Urban Realism,” has peppered the walls with all varieties of the debris of street life: cardboard, Arizona tea cans, even the police.
It is immediately obvious that Luis Sahagun does not care very much for cops.
“I can only tell people my experience,” Sahagun told me. “In Chicago Heights, the police are definitely bad.”
The stenciled image of the ICE officer becomes a monomaniacal obsession in Sahagun’s multimedia works. The most disassociated expression of this, “The Beautiful,” finds the ICE cop in a gold picture frame, hung on a wallpaper of abstracted ICE officers posed in syncopated floral patterns.
“The shapes of them together form a kind of hydra, a monster.”
Can you blame him for his preoccupation with monolithic authority? President Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement has set a new record for deportations for the third year in a row. That is 396,906 real people tossed out of their homes for crossing an imaginary line. 4,000 more than the year before.
Sahagun admits deriving influence from guerilla artists and stencil innovators like Banksy, Blek le Rat, and WK Interact & Invader. But his art lies not so much in the environment in which it is presented or the politics of vandalism. The sinister images of authority could easily read as adolescent posturing, but I have little reason to doubt Sahagun’s sincerity in engaging the viewer in a political confrontation.
In “Naturalized Citizens,” Sahagun’s “undocumented” birds hold the most promise for being a lasting, potent, and sophisticated political icon. Why should human beings be smuggled, imprisoned and tagged when even birds are free to be roam wherever they choose? Did you ever ask a pigeon for its papers?
It is this absurd reality that Sahagun’s work inhabits. One in which few can be bothered to notice the suffering of the people most responsible for putting food on their plates. For making the invisible visible, some credit is due.
Sahagun’s side of the story is one that is rarely told, so he may be forgiven for telling it loudly.
