Earth Odyssey
Solo exhibition, 2025. Gordon Parks Gallery, St. Paul, MN, USA.
“Alien: any person not a citizen of the United States”
“To qualify for an O-1 visa, you must demonstrate extraordinary ability by national or international acclaim, or a record of extraordinary achievement and must be coming temporarily to the United States to continue work in the area of extraordinary ability.”
Uscis.gov
Exhibition Statement
I am a non-resident 👽 with exxxxtraordinary abilities. In this exhibition, for the first time together, I present a cohesive body of work that I have been creating since 2018, when I started my first O-1B visa application process. This process was beyond challenging and highly performative. While my labor and struggle were invisible in my everyday life, to cope, I turned them into a journey, wearing the “alienness” as an extraordinary superpower: an opportunity to both celebrate and protect how vulnerable, deeply scrutinized and uprooted I felt. That's how my Earth Odyssey began.
Dressed as my alter ego “The Alien,” and longing for a sense of home, I travelled far east and west, exploring North American iconic landscapes, known symbols and pop culture references, feeling both a sense of familiarity and estrangement. When visiting new places as “The Alien” I wondered: how do I relate to new geographies, iconic landmarks, and spaces of memory? How can I fit into this new landscape and culture?
Seven years into my 👽 Odyssey, to complicate this experience, when I travel back to my own country, I now feel like a stranger who is no longer able to blend into the place I used to call “home”. Caught in the liminal space of longing and not fully belonging, and suspended between reality and fiction, the Alien suit became my armor. A visualization of how it feels to carry roots of distant land and exist in a body that is split into two by a red, pulsing sensation of living in between places and cultures.
As you walk through the gallery, I invite you to explore all the places this Exxxxtraordinary journey has taken me so far. And if you have ever felt like an 👽 here or elsewhere, I hope you can find resonance and share your story in this book.
Audio guide: Exhibition statement + description of the gallery layout read by the artist
You Are Here
Choregraphed by Zoe Cinel and performed by Kaya Lovestrad for 2018 Choreographer's Evening at the Walker Art Center. (Curator: Pramila Vasudevan)
You Are Here is a virtual journey to home, where home is an unreachable space in memory. Borders—these imposed political constructs on land—are impactful and internalized. When crossing aerial borders, immigrants are forced to become vulnerable monitored bodies, performing identities that allow them the right of passage in their rite of passing through life in this contemporary world. They drag their memories of land and culture all along their journey with the hope to relive those memories in their reality. And You Are Here recreates that journey on stage. https://walkerart.org/magazine/maija-brown-on-choreographers-evening-2018
Photos by Bobby Rogers, courtesy of the Walker Art Center