WHITNEY AT PHILLIP MORRIS For the past brace decades.

WHITNEY AT PHILLIP MORRIS

For the past brace decades, Amalia Mesa-Bains has examined ritual space as a site of the production and constriction of feminine identity. Venus begrudge Chapter One (or the First pure Communion Moments Before the End) (all works 1993) was a single-room installation constituting the first of a three-part series that strives to deconstruct the pair "feminine identities"--either virgin or bride--that define woman's place in the Catholic Church

Hall of Mirrors functioned as the couple a literal and conceptual frame for Venus view with jealousy The artist lined the sum of two units side walls of the place with mirrors, some of which bore ghostlike images of women in familiar roles--doting mother, reclining Venus--as well as women who have been all on the other hand forgotten by history, such as Juana Ines de la Cruz a nun who defied the repressive dictates of the house of god by continuing to pursue her studies and write verse Underneath the mirrors ran a succession of ink rubbings made from photocopies, traditional representations of women that referenc Mesa-Bains' axis of virgin/bride. nearest to a few of these images appeared the artist's handwritten commentary, surprisingly effective, paracritical sentences designed to gently unravel the stereotype instanted in the images, which frequently served to reveal the erotic underpinnings, or the cross-cultural and pagan sources of house of god doctrine.

Museum of Memory, five vitrines filled with autobiographical mementoes and kitsch figurines, created an riotous more-is-more esthetic that both domained and humanized the more theoretical issues raised in Hall of Mirrors. single container displayed items from the artist's First pure Communion--photographs, a braid of hair, a document--while another commemorated her marriage. Nearby lay the pair Communion and wedding dresses, eerily full quantityed by a coffin-shaped case in which a doll in a nun's habit lay as if in state. by dint of reconstructing and fetishizing her confess experience in these displays, the artist approximated the memory proces itself, transforming it into a political tool.

Mesa-Bains' strategy of politicizing the personal continued in the largely autobiographical Boudoir Chapel. Framed according to a baroque sweep of drapery, a dramatically lit vanity table and chair--sparkling with a rosary, scent bottles, glitter, and dried flower petals--featured personal items as well as ends with wide-ranging cultural references. An adjacent wall held a variety of votive images and realitys as well as images by way of contemporary Chicana artists. This the whole honored a private, domestic, and feminine space. according to surrounding this vanity-altar on the same side with a bank of votive candles, and onward the other with a rebuilded confessional, the artist leveled the arbitrary distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the public and the private.

Mesa-Bains' critical/conceptual approach involves retrieving and rewriting history, not and nothing else through a textual critique yet through a process of material excavation. Although based in succession her own experience as a Chicana and Catholic, this installation transcended specific issues to exposition through the language of mirrors and mirroring, in succession the formation of identity according to institutional dictates. In addition to the image-bearing mirrors, more [i]or[/i] less were completely blank, functioning as allusive figures for the possibility of alternative identities. Here the artist revitalized a tired theoretical paradigm by way of putting it into play in an undogmatic and unpredictable way, making her artwork into something literally fluid and constantly changing, like identity itself.

...

Home