Allie Tsubota: Milk Teeth at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York takes a single 1870 photograph as its point of departure and follows the threads it pulls loose. The image shows 75 Chinese boys and young men who were trafficked from California to North Adams, Massachusetts, to work as strikebreakers against French Canadian laborers. Confined to the factory site under carceral conditions, they remained in North Adams in the decade before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Tsubota treats the photograph less as a document than as an archaeological site, asking what it reveals, what it withholds and how invention functions within histories that cannot be fully known.
The exhibition moves between archival and original photographs, sculptural works and an extended fictional text. A speculative novella centers on an imagined child who may or may not appear in the 1870 image, using para-fictive narrative to trace the social, political, material and spectatorial forces that collide in the making of any photograph. The invented boy becomes a figure through which to map racial, geological and cosmological time, connecting the 19th-century labor regime to present-day systems of surveillance, detention and deportation.
Tsubota also examines the material history of photography itself. Screen prints chart planetary arrangements, while photographs of construction materials and sculptural works incorporating cast silver teeth locate the medium within histories of extraction and the laboring body. Self-portraits link the 1870 photograph to the body as a physical archive of injury and repair, exploring ideas of accumulated, fragmented and eroded history. Photography appears here not primarily through light or memory, but as an extractive process shaped by flesh, bone and silver.
The project avoids simple equivalence between past and present. Instead, it asks how histories might be fractured, interpreted and reconstructed to reveal the unresolved questions that the photographed body holds. As BAXTER ST’s 2026 Resident Artist, Tsubota brings together photography, video, archives and text to examine visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. Milk Teeth does not offer a single narrative. It presents a set of overlapping investigations into race, immigration, labor and the material conditions that allow an image to exist at all.
Image: © Allie Tsubota
Instagram 
Facebook 
Pinterest 
X / Twitter 