In Some Boxes and Two Photographs About America, a suite of three projects, Camilo Ontiveros expands his work on questions of immigration to ask how borders— whether they be of self, home, or nation— are performed in our current political moment. In It’s Not Just Security, It’s Peace of Mind Ontiveros presents an overwhelming installation of 120 security system boxes that cover the gallery from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Ontiveros collected these boxes over a period of six months, while he worked installing alarm systems in homes and banks across Los Angeles and Orange counties. If in the home or bank, these boxes are normally hidden from view, in the context of the gallery Ontiveros purposefully exposes them, exponentially multiplying their visibility through the repetition of their display. He empties the security boxes of their circuitry, sands down the insignias that had formerly adorned their surface, and presents the boxes, now hollowed, as vestiges of the security that they once maintained.

The suite of works presented in Some Boxes and Two Photographs About America situate the sense of security produced by such alarm systems within larger social, political, and economic processes that involve not only the maintenance of individual wealth, but resonate with the rhetoric of security that fills the United States involvement in global war. The security system boxes are framed by two photographs that figure the immigrant, as it is shuttled between the discourses of citizen and alien.

In Este Es Mi País, one is confronted with a large photograph taken of a Navy propaganda billboard. The billboard shows the visage of a young Latino sailor juxtaposed with the Spanish words which read This Is My Country. The billboard, intended to lure the immigrant into the thrall of global war, demonstrates the rhetoric of nationalism that underwrites our contemporary political moment. The figure of the immigrant turns to citizen once he sacrifices his life for the nation. Yet, this figure of citizenship and civil life, as presented in the visage of the young Latino sailor, is starkly contrasted by the installation that

The Burial of Anastacio Hernandez is an installation that commemorates the death of Anatastacio Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who resisted deportation, was beaten by twenty border patrol and immigration agents, and shocked with a stun gun at the San Ysidro border in 2010. Hernandez, had lived and worked in the United States since he was 14 years old, and had five children born in the United States.

Between the civil life of the Latino sailor in Este Es Mi País and the murder of the undocumented immigrant in The Burial of Anastasio Hernandez, Ontiveros asks how the ideology of security comes at the cost of immigrants lives. Some Boxes and Two Photographs about America urges us to rethink the relation between security, private wealth, and global war and the way that such relations have produced the failure of a democratic ideal, also known to some as, America.

Este Es Mi Pais, 2011.

It’s Not Just Security, It’s a Peace of Mind, 2011.

The Burrial of Anastacio Hernandez, 2011.