Hew Locke: A Sea of Suspended Boats Evokes the Migrant’s Perilous Journey

The installation at the Pérez Art Museum Miami features dozens of small boats suspended from the ceiling, forming many horizons that nearly blend into one.

Hew Locke, For Those in Peril on the Sea (2011), model boats and mixed media, 79 boats; dimensions variable. (Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase from the Helena Rubinstein Philanthropic Fund at The Miami Foundation Installation view Pérez Art Museum Miami. Reproduced with the permission of the artist For Those in Peril on the Seawas commissioned by the Creative Foundation for the Folkestone Triennial 2011. All photos by by Daniel Azoulay Photography unless otherwise noted.)

By Monica Uszerowicz for Hyperallergic

MIAMI — Hew Locke’s installation For Those in Peril on the Sea was exhibited once in a church’s nave at the Folkstone Triennial in 2011 and later at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) in 2013, where it’s currently on view for a second iteration. Once part of the PAMM’s inaugural programming, the installation has powerful context in a museum that sits just miles from the Port of Miami, bordering Biscayne Bay, in a city comprised primarily of immigrants. The piece features dozens of small boats — model ships and replicas — suspended from the ceiling, forming many horizons that nearly blend into one; we must look up toward them, as if we were submerged beneath the water. The boats are handmade and decorated by Locke with cardboard, papier-mâché, and wood. Each is different — there are multicolored miniature oil tankers, British police boats, Indonesian fishing boats, cruise ships, rafts, schooners — but they do have one thing in common: they all face the water.

In a conversation with Jarrett Earnest for The Miami Rail, Locke explains, “I am very conscious of the predicament of Cuban Americans in relation to the piece … There are people in Calais trying to sneak onto a ferry to get into London and at the same time someone is doing the same thing in Havana, or getting onto a rickety boat off the coast of Senegal to get to Tenerife, where you have people sunning themselves on holiday and in the midst of a dramatic rescue situation.” Just last year, the Miami Herald reported that eight Cuban migrants had arrived on the shores of Miami Beach in a 25-foot wooden boat “with a small engine.” Two years before that, a boat of Haitian migrants made it to Ft. Lauderdale (a city just north of Miami); one man drowned. Meanwhile, as in Tenerife, tourists on vacations lay in the sand, unwitting background characters in a story encompassing so many others.

Read more at Hyperallergic.