Axle Contemporary
a mobile artspace based in Santa Fe, New Mexico
David Horvitz*
this dark rainy night
October 3 – November 2, 2025
at Axle Contemporary
The title of the exhibition, this dark rainy night, is excerpted from a poem by Keiho Yasutaro Soga. It speaks of his arrest in 1941, when he was taken from his family and home and incarcerated in camps in New Mexico.
During the Second World War there were two camps in the state that unjustly incarcerated Japanese men without evidence of any crime committed. They were imprisoned solely for being Japanese. These camps were the Santa Fe Detention and Internment (Incarceration) Camp and the Lordsburg Internment (Incarceration) Camp. In Santa Fe 4,555 men went through the camp.
(Throughout the interior of the United States about 120,000 Japanese and American citizens of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated.)
Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Christian minister from Hawai’i, also incarcerated in New Mexico, found a branch from a tree in camp and carved a small cat. The carving is hidden in a display case in the New Mexico History Museum.
Some of the incarcerated were permitted to leave the Santa Fe Camp to work in apple orchards in Tesuque. (There are apple trees in Tesuque that are over 100 years old.)
On July 27, 1942, 147 men were being transferred to the Lordsburg Camp from Bismark, North Dakota. After departing from the train station they were to walk several miles in the middle of night under a full moon. Two men, Hirota Isomura and Toshiio Kobata, both from California, were too ill to keep up and trailed behind. The guard who walked with them shot and killed both men in the night. Their lives disappeared with the desert dew.**
Isomura and Kobata were buried in Lordsburg. After the war Isomura’s remains were transferred to Ft. Bliss Cemetery in El Paso, Texas. Kobata’s were transferred to Riverside Cemetery in Brawley, California.
The exhibition will consist of various elements.
Two glass marbles shaped with earth collected from Lordsburg. The earth creating material fragility and tension inside the glass, the tension of this history on the landscape in today’s present.
Photographs of the current gravesites for both Kobata and Isoumura.
Ceramic cats inspired by Watanabe’s woodcarvings made with the public in workshops in Santa Fe in September.
100 lost cat flyers photocopied and stapled across Santa Fe.
Apple pies with apples picked from Tesuque made with miso and buckwheat will be sold each Saturday of the exhibition.***
Tanka poems by Keiho Yasutaro Soga, Sojin Tokiji, and Muin Otokichi Ozaki are screenprinted on the pie boxes.
Each apple pie is baked with a ceramic cat.
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Pies are available by pre-order and can be picked up on Saturday mornings in Santa Fe (Stop by and see Matthew in front of SITE SANTA FE or call our text 505-670-5854) . Pies cost $35, including tax. Pies may be ordered online on the form below, or by phoning 505-670-5854 with a credit card. Deliveries in Santa Fe are available. Call or text 505-670-5854 to arrange or email info@axleart.com.
Pie baking and fulfillment in accordance with the New Mexico Homemade Food Act of 2021
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Pies are baked by Matthew Chase-Daniel, at 1 Likely Road, Santa Fe NM, (505) 670-5854, info@axleart.com
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Miso-Buckwheat Apple Pies
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Standard: Tesuque apples, wheat flour, buckwheat flour, sugar, brown sugar, butter, miso, buckwheat groats, lemon juice, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, lemon zest, pineapple juice
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Gluten-Free: Tesuque apples, rice flour, buckwheat flour, sugar, brown sugar, butter, tapioca flour, miso, buckwheat groats, lemon juice, cinnamon, vanilla, salt, lemon zest, pineapple juice
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This product is home produced and is exempt from state licensing and inspection. This product may contain allergens.
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Pies are produced in a facility that also processes tree nuts, peanuts, soy, dairy, ceramic cats, photography, lumber, paperwork, websites, social media, email, and laundry.
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* Horvitz's work flock of wingless birds (2025) is currently on exhibit at Finquita in SITE'S 12th International. The work addresses the Santa Fe Detention and Internment (Incarceration) Camp.
** On August 2, 1942, in services spoken in Japanese for Kobata and Isomura, Kawasaki, a civilian camp leader, made the following statement: Our two brothers, who arrived at this camp from North Dakota, ailing in poor health, and who didn’t even have the opportunity to become acquainted with the other internees here, sadly disappeared from the earth along with the desert dew…
*** The apple pies are made using recipes developed by Leif Hedendal in San Francisco and Giles Clark of Cafe 2001 in Los Angeles.
Pies are available by pre-order and can be picked up on Saturday mornings in Santa Fe (Stop by and see Matthew in front of SITE SANTA FE or call our text 505-670-5854) . Pies cost $35, including tax. Pies may be ordered online on the form below, or by phoning 505-670-5854 with a credit card. Orders must be received by noon on the Monday preceding pickup (unless indicated otherwise somewhere). Deliveries in Santa Fe are available. Call or text 505-670-5854 to arrange or email info@axleart.com.
Clay Workshops- Cat-Making
David Horvitz and Axle Contemporary
for
this dark rainy night
David Horvitz and Axle Contemporary led workshops in Santa Fe in which participants created small cat sculptures which will be fired, exhibited, and then baked into Apple Pies as a part of Horvitz's this dark rainy night exhibition at Axle Contemporary. All workshops were free and open to the public.
Look through the photo gallery here to identify the artist who created the cat that you received with your pie.
Cat-Making Workshops--The Project
There is a small wooden cat hidden in the New Mexico History Museum. It was carved on a found stick by Reverend Tamasaku Watanabe, a Christian minister from Hawai‘i, while he was incarcerated in New Mexico during World War II. At the time, there were two incarceration camps for Japanese men in the state: one in Santa Fe and one in Lordsburg.
Many of those imprisoned were arrested in the days following Pearl Harbor, their names already flagged on the FBI’s Custodial Detention Index—often called the “ABC List.” This list categorized community leaders, religious figures, teachers, and even fishermen as potential threats, despite there being no evidence of any crimes.
Watanabe passed through both of the New Mexico camps after first being arrested in Hawai‘i in December 1941. He was initially held in two detention camps there, then sent to the Angel Island Detention Facility in California, followed by the Sam Houston Internment Camp in Texas, before finally being transferred to New Mexico.
Today, the wooden cat is tucked away on the reverse side of a display case in the museum’s World War II gallery. It seems almost hidden, as if meant to be forgotten. I like to imagine that at night the cat escapes, wandering the streets of Santa Fe.
For my project, I am hoping to find participants to help me create hundreds of ceramic cat sculptures. These will then be baked into apple pies. I read that some of the incarcerated Japanese men were allowed to work in orchards in Tesuque. I wonder if the apple trees I’ve seen in Finquita were picked by these men.
this dark rainy night got some love from one of our favorite food shows out of Los Angeles, GOOD FOOD!
AND
Giles Clark of Cafe 2001 in Los Angeles is expanding the this dark rainy night pie project to California! He's created a special pie with buckwheat groats, brown sugar, and a compote derived from Tesuque apples. And the whole pie is topped with an extreme layer of puff pastry (and a Horvitz cat).
If you are in L.A., stop in and get a slice or a whole pie! Only 2 pies baked each day, and only for alimited
Cafe 2001
2001 E 7th Street, Los Angeles, California 90021
https://www.instagram.com/cafe2001.la/
David Horvitz
David Horvitz is an American Los Angeles based conceptual artist known for his diverse practice spanning media and subject matter, attuning himself to places, eschewing categorization. His expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, natural environments, and gardening. An ocean romantic, His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, through aesthetic propositions aimed at viewing art as experience, to undermine or even erasing these distances. Using image, text and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, floating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works– in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost-and-found services– our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real.
David Horvitz eating pie, September 2025
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A Co-Production of Axle Contemporary
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SITE SANTA FE, as part of the 12th International, Once Within a Time, curated by Cecilia Alemani
