The case of the missing border
2017
Poster on Fine Matte Poster Paper
15 in. x 22 in.
November 27, 2016, we—my sister and I—had our first actual conversation with our neighbor who has been living to the east of our house ever since we moved into our neighborhood, after we helped him and his son remove the old fence separating our properties that had all but fallen to the ground after an extremely windy night a week or so ago. We found out quite a bit about each other; turns out, he had moved to Canada from Pakistan about forty years ago and his son bought him the house he currently resides in after the son moved into an apartment with his wife. He lives alone and doesn’t really get out of the house much except for groceries because of the lack of a familiar community.
The idea of “the edge”—a rich space in terms of natural landscape before modernism manipulated it in order to create property lines and tamed natures—from Alexander Wilson’s Culture of Nature really struck a chord with me, and I’ve had the idea of making a “Missing Poster” about it ever since I explored the various directions that idea could lead one to. However, I wasn’t able to find satisfying specificities about the visual and textual elements for the “poster” until we had a conversation with our neighbour. Considering the tenuous and unfriendly political relationship between the two countries of India and Pakistan, it is interesting to note the fact that quite literally, the only thing that divides these two lands is a border between them, for the communities in these two countries are more similar than different in terms of cultural values. This interaction prompted me into think about how borders quite literally create boundaries, not just between houses, but also extend them to divide communities, and how less imposing these borders seem once one has stepped out of them.
In a nutshell, the poster represents an event that quite literally happened to the three of us—my sister, my neighbour, and I—applied to a larger context. These issues and observations about separation of the land, and by extension, communities, because of something as insignificant and man-made as “the edge”, along with the relationship between communities outside these borders, and that of successful communication as the key to problem-solving, are some ideas I wanted to explore with my “Missing Poster". In terms of the visual aesthetics of the photograph of the fence, I wanted to play around with the idea of the fence half-heartedly being pictured in a memory because its ex-owner would rather it stay gone to maintain a peaceful relationship between the two “countries". I experimented with a “3-D” effect with a heightened brightness to symbolize its once-realness but its currently diminishing importance, in order to achieve that “fading memory” impression to it.