Sharp Edges of the Texas Border in Downtown Exhibit

Hard truths beget hard surfaces in the work of James Drake. A monochrome toughness, empowered by sharp edges and the blunt force of fact, pervade his installation at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s downtown gallery (838 G St., through April 9).

Drake lives in El Paso, Tex., on the cusp of Mexico. Like San Diego, El Paso has a teeming neighbor across the border, and, for 22 years, Drake has watched the tug-of-war played out between American authorities and the citizens of Juarez, over how and where the line between their two worlds should be drawn. A “Tortilla Curtain” of fencing there and the proposed drainage ditch here are among the most amusing and superficial solutions. Nevertheless, the game continues, the rules never quite keeping pace with the needs of the players.

What Drake does through his art is remind us, starkly and often poignantly, of the human toll of such belabored, desperate, insufficient efforts to satisfy those needs. His installation, “Juarez/El Paso,” the centerpiece of the La Jolla show, focuses on the 1987 deaths by suffocation of 18 aliens attempting to cross the border near El Paso in an airtight refrigerator boxcar. Drake’s work pays homage to the lost lives in a tone shifting from elegy to anger, irony to anguish.

Each component of the installation combines a large charcoal drawing with adjacent objects or text. One drawing depicts the infamous boxcar, a dark haunting icon of tragedy. Isolated on its track, the car is surrounded only by smudged streaks of charcoal, the ghostlike handprints of the victims clawing in vain for freedom. On the floor beneath the drawing stands a pile of coal-black stones, a funeral mound embedded with a crowbar like that apparently tossed into the boxcar by the smuggler before sealing its doors.

In another drawing, a plume of dense, black smoke rises from a heap of rubble on the floor--shoes, dented cans, broken bottles, a doll, tools, shards of pottery, all blackened as if charred by fire. Like the lives wasted in the boxcar incident, these objects, once useful and nourishing, have been abandoned, sacrificed, made detritus in an ugly reversal of the alchemical process.

An aggressive, taunting tableau occupies the wall between these two drawings. At its center, a welded steel figure of a female nude, generalized and without a head, prances on a semi-circular platform. This stage protrudes from a large charcoal drawing showing the railway tracks stopping abruptly at a tall, black barrier. This is the end of the line, and the woman, like the two black steel swans on the floor at her sides, seems to symbolize the uneasy mix of death and beauty, promise and defeat that greets those who cross the threshold to the north.

Two archways against this wall symbolize this concept more explicitly. By nature of their open form, they invite through passage, but at the same time they repel prospective entrants with a threatening array of military weapons or a daunting display of knives and tools. These cancel the open invitation of the arches and render passage through them a life-or-death proposition.

“The Illegal,” a recent work related to the “Juarez/El Paso” installation, pairs a poem written by one of the victims of the boxcar incident with a drawing suggesting the interior of his collective tomb. “How beautiful is the United States/Illinois, California, and Tennessee,” the poem reads. “But over in my country/A piece of the sky belongs to me./Goodby, Laredo, Weslaco, San Antonio./Houston and Dallas are in my song./Goodby, El Paso, I am back Chamizal./Your friend the illegal has returned.”

Knowing the poet’s fate, his anticipation of returning to his homeland, where he can at least claim a piece of the sky, reads with tragic irony. In Drake’s drawing of the mismatched shoes and garments strewn on the floor of the empty boxcar, the loss of life is again suggested obliquely. Rather than dwelling on the obvious violence of the situation, Drake focuses on its residue, on the peripheral traces of death, and this makes the work all the more disturbing and absorbing.

The two other assemblages in the show, “Knife Table” and “Machine Gun Bench,” are harsh assaults on the violence of contemporary life and leisure, but the crude and heavy-handed manner of their realization deprives them of a more enduring power.

In the “Juarez/El Paso” work, Drake encourages the viewer to grasp in personal terms the dilemmas of those crossing the border. Their current options, he implies, are all, literally, dead ends. By presenting only symptoms of the situation and his own poetic visions of it, Drake challenges the viewer to shape his own interpretation and, in the best tradition of socially concerned art, to transform that response into resolved and committed action.