Milk Teeth takes as its starting point a photograph made in 1870 depicting 75 Chinese boys and young men who were trafficked from California to North Adams, Massachusetts, to work as strikebreakers against French Canadian workers. Confined to the factory site under carceral conditions, they remained in North Adams during the decade preceding the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Using archival and original photographs, sculptural works, and an extended fictional text, Tsubota traces the interconnected histories of race, immigration, labor, extraction, and photography.
Approaching the 1870 portrait as an archaeological site, Tsubota centers the story of an imagined child who may or may not appear in the photograph. Moving between the historical record and fiction, a speculative novella considers what the image reveals, what it withholds, and how the lure of invention functions within histories that cannot be fully known.
The exhibition also turns to the geological and material history of photography and the minerals that allow an image to be recorded. Tsubota examines photography not primarily through light or memory, but as an extractive and bodily process shaped by labor—a relationship to flesh, bone, and silver. Screen prints chart planetary arrangements, while photographs of construction materials and sculptural works incorporating cast silver teeth locate the medium within histories of matter and the laboring body. Self-portraits connect the 1870 photograph to the body as a physical archive of injury and repair, exploring ideas of accumulated, fragmented, and eroded history.
Against the backdrop of contemporary surveillance, detention, and deportation, Milk Teeth considers how earlier histories of racialized labor and immigration continue to reverberate. Avoiding simple equivalence between past and present, the exhibition asks how histories might be fractured, interpreted, and reconstructed to reveal the unresolved questions that the photographed body holds.
“Milk Teeth looks to a single historical photograph as a way of recognizing the multiple and often opposing forces—social, political, material, and spectatorial—that collide in the making of any image,” said Allie Tsubota, BAXTER ST 2026 Resident Artist. “In the process, the figure of the invented boy becomes central. He emerges from the para-fictive to help illuminate these forces and to chart them across racial, geological, and cosmological time.”
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York