Installation view of Reclamation at Ogden Contemporary Arts, featuring Lani Asunción’s Duty-Free Paradise (2020–2026), which combines photographic vinyl panels, neon text, and a floor installation referencing Queen Liliʻuokalani’s words.

At a moment when American political rhetoric once again toys with territorial ambition and “friendly takeovers,” Ogden Contemporary Arts presents an exhibition that reminds viewers that the last age of U.S. imperial expansion never truly ended. In Reclamation at Ogden Contemporary Arts, three Filipine artists explore the legacy of U.S. expansion of colonialism overseas at the turn of the 20th century. Following the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. acquired Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico and established a protectorate over Cuba. The subsequent Philippine-American War (1899–1902) ushered in another 44 years of American imperial presence in the Philippines—a history whose consequences continue to shape diaspora, labor systems, and land use across the Pacific and, as the exhibition reveals, even here in Utah.

These artists’ stories, not typically taught in American history classes, depict how the last hundred-plus years find purchase in today’s reality—a reality of communities who still experience intergenerational trauma, who see the results of exploitation on their own ancestors and families as well as the land. The artists’ works open us up to new insights and broaden the scope of our understanding of the costs of global power. With a focus on the global diaspora of Filipino people and culture in the wake of the Philippine-American War, artists Lani Asunción, Camille Hoffman, and Kill Joy also present the impact of the era’s systems of extractive labor, U.S. militarism, and tourism and the exploitative impact these have had on communities. This impact was felt simultaneously in Hawai’i, where the illegal U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 led to a labor linkage between the Philippines and the sugar plantations of Hawai’i.

The exhibition opens with the work of Boston artist Lani Asunción. Their multi-media “Duty-Free Paradise,” 2020-2026, incorporates vinyl photographic images, neon, and framed photos by Richard Misrach and Karl Struss borrowed from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Posing questions about tourism and the ongoing colonialism in Hawai’i, where the artist grew up, Asunción presents a clearly defined statement that is both deftly installed and visually engaging. Nearby, Asunción includes a floor piece titled “BLOODLESS: BLOOD, BONES, ALOHA!” The title words sit upon a mix of sand and dirt and reference the words of deposed Queen Lili’uokalani as she was imprisoned in the Iolani Palace after being overthrown by a Euro-American coup. She wrote “My love for my homeland and my beloved people, the bones of my bones, the blood of my blood! Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!” The presentation of these words in soil on the floor grounds these words while also forcing the viewer to take care stepping around them as they walk through the gallery.

A three-channel video installation by Lani Asunción fills a gallery wall with vivid green light, including imagery of a boxer wearing gloves—a reference to the cultural history of boxing in Hawaiʻi.

In looped 3-channel videos “Iosepa: Skull Valley (1889–1917)” and “Fair Use Hawai‘i,”Asunción envelops the viewer with overhead shots of the islands’ spectacular landscapes alongside images of the Kānaka Maoli memorial in Iosepa, Utah—the remote settlement in Utah’s west desert founded in 1889 by Native Hawaiian converts to the LDS Church—and the LDS temple later built in Lā‘ie after many of Iosepa’s residents returned home. The artist also appears donning hand wraps and boxing gloves, referencing the role boxing has played in Hawai‘i over the last century. All the images they use counter historic legacy with cultural practice, violence with beauty, and perception with reality.

The final piece in Asunción’s presentation is “Settlers of the Pacific,” a large floor piece complete with golf green and hexagonal game table, where play pieces from the popular Catan series have been customized with elements of Hawai’i’s land and cities. Overhead, blue camouflage pieces are a reminder of water, military, and fishing nets. The piece’s playfulness belies its critique of the commodification of the islands. It’s also beautifully crafted, reinforcing the artist’s vision by drawing the eye into the world they’ve created, then questioning what the effects of consumerism, militarism, and tourism have had on that world.

Lani Asunción, Settlers of the Pacific, installation view. A customized game table referencing the board game Catan sits atop a golf-green-like surface, critiquing the commodification of land, tourism, and militarization in Hawaiʻi.

Wall installation by Camille Hoffman, created in collaboration with Andre Taylor, overlays hand-painted imagery and salt-based watercolor onto a reproduction of William Henry Jackson’s The Salt Lake Valley, connecting geological history and Pacific migration.

The east wall of the space holds NYC-based artist Camille Hoffman’s large-scale installation, created in collaboration with Andre Taylor. Using a vinyl reproduction of William Henry Jackson’s mid-19th-century painting “The Salt Lake Valley,” Hoffman has spliced the reproduction of the painting with hand-painted watercolor imagery she created using salt sourced from Utah, the Philippines, and Mexico. The salt from those locations all originated in the Pacific Ocean and the images of Hoffman’s hands moving the salt through water reference the movement of that ocean into Emigration Canyon millions of years ago. The work’s materials give it visual power and the vinyl dripping down from the wall onto the floor emphasizes the fluidity of the stories and their depictions.

In the upstairs gallery, Texas artist Kill Joy’s prints from 2020-2025 line the hallway walls, their imagery and colors boosting the political power of the text. The compositions balance bold graphic clarity with finely honed illustration, channeling solidarity into direct visual language that confronts the human and environmental costs of injustice. At the end of the hallway, the title panel for the artist’s “Fire in the Womb” installation is an explosion of hand-painted cardboard and brown butcher paper that reflects the materials of puppet makers. Created in collaboration with Zane Wilcox, the piece opens with the artist’s words—“every large fire begins with many small fires.” The large fire created in the space is an earth womb of an ancestral mother figure from Filipino folklore. On the opposite wall are placards created in collaboration with community members in the practice of community healing. The entire installation is vibrant and the fires they reference seem to crackle even though there is no sound element. Visitors are invited to create their own contributions at a work table placed along the stairwell.

The variety of materials used by the artists in Reclamation—salt, soil, vinyl, cardboard, neon—engage and delight. Their words open up new stories we likely did not know. Their skills bolster their messages. Though it is difficult to fully understand and appreciate the exhibition without reading the descriptive labels, there is a lot to take in from this small group exhibition. Its physical presence alone conveys how distant imperial ventures reverberate locally. The works seem much bigger than the square footage they take up, and as the artists trace lines from Hawai‘i and the Philippines to Utah’s deserts and valleys, we see how intervention abroad reshapes communities at home with reciprocal currents of migration, labor, and empire. The impetus to find the new is just as powerful as the drive to return to the familiar.

Prints by Kill Joy line the upstairs gallery at Ogden Contemporary Arts, combining bold graphic imagery and text to address militarization, environmental exploitation, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Reclamation, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, through May 3

All images courtesy of the author.

Gina Cavallo

Gina Cavallo has been a curator, registrar, and executive director in museums for over 35 years. She spent many years as an art critic for publications in Phoenix. She began her career at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, was a founding curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, spent two terms managing exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was the Executive Director at the Mission Inn Foundation & Museum in Riverside, California. Her current role is Director of Development for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle where she also serves as the curator of the Kendall Center Exhibition Series. She moved to Orem in 2024 with her husband, a theatre faculty member at UVU.