About Shane Flores
Phantoms of a Rail Town
Project Notes
About Shane
Shane Flores is a videographer and artist currently residing somewhere in the mythic Aztec homeland of Aztlan. After coming of age as a poet, he decided to channel his renegade impulse into the creation of electronic media as an act of resistance and survival. Youthful forays into the deconstruction of cinematic practice degenerated fruitfully into abstract video for immersive environments and private ritual. After 9/11, he returned to conceptual video, a development that has led to his current interest in the creation of media for cultural institutions. Mr. Flores lives with two cats that insist on bringing him headless animal corpses that vary in type, depending on the season.
Phantoms of a Rail Town
Phantoms of Rail Town
Phantoms of a Rail Town explores the late 19th Century Chinese immigrant experience in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The history of these immigrants is unique. Despite occupying a small but crucial niche in the civic fabric, they are practically nonexistent in the official and social record. Despite being productive members of the community, Chinese immigrants encountered obstacles to integration and were excluded from developing influence within the social spheres of the city.
This project addresses the reasons for that exclusion and attempts to paint a portrait of these pioneers through the shape of their absence. The project includes a full room installation, with audiovisual components, designed to invoke the site of the infamous, but historically significant, Yee Shun murder case that led to the admission of ethnic Chinese as full participants in the US and territorial legal system. The project also includes a website that documents and contextualizes excerpts from The Optic newspaper, practically the only source for information on the Chinese immigrants in Las Vegas. This project is a synthesis of incomplete parts, historic and contemporary images, research and historical record, in an attempt to convey the story of the Phantoms of a Rail Town.
Project Notes
How to tell a story in words and images, without photos and primary documents?
The Chinese immigrants in Las Vegas left no known first hand accounts of their history resulting in their voices being absent from historical record. I was reluctant to “speak for” them as often happens in traditional iterations of this form. The greatest challenge was finding the right voice with which to tell the story. Turning to the historical record, I think I found a trustworthy narrator to tell what tale, of these pioneers, there is to tell. This historical personage is also the perfect person to explain why the only extant accounts of their time in Las Vegas, were left in the hands of a most unsuitable recording angel.
Finding visual context in unlikely places and using scale and juxtaposition to create meaning out of the sparse manifests and records was one of the greater challenges of this project. A multi screen video projection turned out to be the right choice to communicate the nuanced historical information. The enlarged visuals and narration paradoxically weights the material with unexpected thoughts and emotions.
New Mexico Highlands University Department of Media Arts and Technology, 901 University Avenue, Las Vegas, New Mexico 87701