Photo by Nicholas Taylor
The Cade Fine Arts Gallery shows "Sueño Americano," a series of pictures that use American cheese as a medium, until Oct 13.
Inside the Cade fine arts gallery, an art installation is prompting conversation about the American dream, deportation, deterioration—and cheese.
The artwork by Lauren Cardenás, an associate professor of printmaking at Louisiana State University, features a series of seven images displaying sunrises and sunsets from airplane windows that are printed onto slices of American cheese and encased in plexiglass.
The moldy cheese represents “an idea … that’s essentially molded into a nightmare of not being able to meet [the] needs” of immigrants, Cardenás said.
Cardenás calls her exhibition “Sueño Americano,” which translates to “American dream,” she said. The exhibit opened in Cade on Aug. 19 and will leave on Oct. 13.
The artist said she was inspired by an NPR piece that featured migrants who were getting deported.
“One man who had been deported a couple of times and ended up coming back every time, he was voicing that on the flight, it was migrants who were handcuffed; there were Border Patrol … officers on the plane,” Cardenás said. “It’s a chartered flight, and they gave them a cheese sandwich and a bottle of water as their farewell meal from leaving the United States.”
Cardenás, the daughter of immigrants “and individuals that benefited from the American dream,” said the uptick in deportations ”is kind of impacting everyone’s lives … and I think it’s important to have a conversation about it.”
She said she has displayed the installation at galleries and other colleges since 2020. It showed in New Orleans for nine months.
“In those nine months, the cheese actively grew mold, which was not my intention,” Cardenás said. “I knew that the cheese would mold. I just didn’t recognize I didn’t account for travel, humidity, changing of climate. So all of these things … exacerbated that internal climate within the plexiglass, so the cheese does actively mold.”
Cardenás, who shot the photographs from airplane windows as she traveled between 2016 and 2022, said the exhibit, which she updates frequently, included 175 slices of cheese at one time to mirror the seat plan of a Boeing 737 charter plane, the kind that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to deport migrants.
“I feel like this piece is important, just because of the times that we’re in,” Cardenás said. “It’s able to initiate a conversation thinking about what is going on within the world. Thinking about immigration, immigration reform. What are these issues that are starting to arise? How is this affecting the greater United States as a whole?”