Best Border Art
Lucy Petrovich's "Desert Views, Desert Deaths"
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Petrovich's stunning installation meshing video and computer imagery was the star of the show at this year's Biennial. The artist used technological wizardry to make her piece a kind of giant computer game: Wielding a mouse, the viewer became a migrant struggling through a confusing--and dangerous--desert. On the scary soundscape, the buzzing of the cicadas sounded a little too much like a vulture for comfort. And the visuals were terrifying. Sharp-edged mesquites and thorny cacti, baked by a blistering sun, kept changing position and blocking the path of escape. White crosses marking the graves of the fallen came flying toward a viewer's head, followed by newspaper headlines bearing the names of the desert's real-life dead, the hapless migrants who perish every year in Arizona's heat.
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