Hidden in Plain Site: Creative Referendums to Human Trafficking
Artist Installations, temporarily sited in cargo containers, Angels Gate Park
April 26 – June 6, 2015

Artistic solutions, also known as creative referendums, developed by nine members of an Artist Team are framed within two cargo containers temporarily sited in Angels Gate Park overlooking the Port – an alluring metaphor given that some people smuggled into the US arrive in shipping containers.

Erich Wise

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Site specific, temporary, sculptural installation on outlook above cargo containers

Proposed Referendum:
Many children, teens and adults, continuously threatened with extreme violence, are killed while trying to escape, or literally worked to death. Remember, and honor, those who have died.

As an echo of the shipping containers on site during the exhibit, two 20-foot by 8-foot rectangles are cleared of grasses. Human trafficking is largely invisible to the public. Wise carves out a habitat for reflection, without dictating the experience. The history of the site is reinterpreted and used in new, novel ways – such as its current use as a center for cultural work. The shapes, reflecting a footprint of the shipping containers, place the public in a space much like a walking circle, as “determined” as the container which houses things transported, or human beings who are trafficked. The rectangular transformations – along with the site history, view of the second largest port in the world, and great Pacific Ocean – add to the sense of connectedness or isolation machinery of our world. It is important to the artist that this “temporary memorial” sculpture live and weather in the space, eventually being taken over by nature.

Click here for Erich Wise artist bio.