Update, July 19: Artforum has selected Salidas y Entradas | Exits and Entrances as one of its critic’s picks. “Given [its] context and the recent protests against inhumane immigration policies, this superb installation, featuring a three-channel video installation and a single-channel projection, carries extra weight.” — Kate Green

Art professor Erin Johnson collaborated with fellow artist Jessica Hankey and participants from three senior centers in El Paso, Texas, to create a bilingual, multichannel, video installation for the University of Texas, El Paso’s Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. Their exhibition, called Salidas y Entradas | Exits and Entrances, opened on May 31, and runs until August 10, 2018.

According to the Rubin Center, “participants from three of El Paso’s senior centers explore the boundaries between rehearsal, improvisation, performance, and critique – traversing the spectrum from the permissible and everyday to the extraordinary or false. With the senior center – a site of social contact, care, and collectivity – as a stage, the performers take up and play with social, political, and geographical imaginaries.”

The exhibition’s opening reception included performances by dancers and bands from Pavo Real Senior Center. The project was commissioned by the Rubin Center with support from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Erin Johnson is visiting assistant professor in both art and digital and computational studies.