The Accidental Immigrant
April 20 to June 17, 2018
The second floor Davis Family Gallery will feature work by Tom Hall, a mid-career artist, recent immigrant, and faculty member at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.
Since moving to the United States from England a few years ago, Hall has been trying to gain empathy with the idea of migration and other people’s movement across borders. He has endeavored to draw parallels with migrants, outsiders, frontiersmen, and refugees in a sometimes futile attempt to find comparable experiences with his childhood and life encounters.
He has recently started to identify as an “immigrant” to align himself with alien groups living dislocated lives here. In The Accidental Immigrant at the Schweinfurth Art Center, Hall continues further to drag his family over borders, searching old migrations that in the past developed new towns described as
“Hope.”
His work includes objects, installation, and film to talk about family identity, the viewed outsider, and language of adoption and the other.