An Art Walk stroll through the story of immigration

Two 50-foot scrolls tell the story from inside.

At Gallery4Culture, Seattle-based artist Eroyn Franklin illustrates immigration, drawing a tale of two characters going through a detention center. The exhibit is one of many open late tonight for Pioneer Square's monthly First Thursday Art Walk.

"I wanted to show people what it looked like, what it felt like inside these places," said Franklin, who investigated the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma and a former Immigration and Naturalization facility on Airport Way in Seattle. "I wanted to bring these ghost places out to the public."

For three months, Franklin worked with journalists from the Common Language Project, a University of Washington-affiliated nonprofit which produces nonfiction multimedia stories.

She toured the facilities, following a detainee's path through processing and filling out background forms. The detainees are assigned "alien numbers," then are taken to a holding cell, followed by a medical area for X-rays and pregnancy tests, and finally to a living cell.

"It's a labyrinth of white cells," said Franklin, 30. "If you step into a hallway, it looks like every other hallway. You're not really sure where you are."

She wasn't allowed to bring in a camera, so as soon as she left the facility, she frantically scrawled down the images from memory, making sure to include details like a wall where detainees wrote the names of their hometowns in tar.

"It was not quite like a prison, just very similar," said Franklin, who took six months to draw out the scenes. "It's mostly kind of disorienting and institutional."

The two main characters in her scroll are based on detainees she met. One was a Mexican woman, who was slated for deportation after being pulled over for expired license tabs. The other was a Cambodian refugee who was at the detention center after being convicted at 18 for driving a getaway car.

Franklin maintains neutrality on illegal immigration, a hot-button issue these days.

"Whenever I start to have an opinion, it changes how people perceive my work," she said. "It's a very complicated issue. You must look at these cases individually."

Marian Liu: 206-464-3825 or mliu@seattletimes.com