Margarita Cabrera at Sara Meltzer

Margarita Cabrera's solo exhibition, titled "Desert Dreams," was an installation of works from 2006 inspired by the journeys of illegal immigrants across the Mexico-U.S. border. The timing was perfect; Congress has been wrangling all year over the details of the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. immigration law in decades. But Cabrera, born in Mexico and living in El Paso, Texas, doesn't engage in the debate so much as provide the viewer with a glimpse of one (fictional) family's quest for the American dream.

Cabrera's artistic practice is labor-intensive; she hand-stitches each object she makes, in vinyl or cloth, inviting comparison to assembly-line workers. Five cactuslike plants in terra-cotta pots placed in the gallery's corners lent the air of an arid landscape. They turned out not to be plants, though, but hand-sewn sculptures, made--ominously--out of olive drab uniforms, with buttons, clothing labels and even zippers still attached. The threads were left untrimmed, evoking cactus spines. One, titled Julieta, was staked with an expandable baton.

Hummer, a life-size vehicle painstakingly sewn in white vinyl with a real Hummer grill, headlights, door handles and mirrors, stirs up the usual associations: power, excess, the military. It's easy to imagine the vehicle's occupants--the zealous Minutemen, perhaps--patrolling the Mexican/American border in air-conditioned comfort. As a symbol of potency, though, the Hummer falls short: its imposing profile becomes flaccid when made of soft vinyl. (The artist's debt to Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures did not go unacknowledged; the gallery exhibited four of Oldenburg's works in a project space.)

Most evocative of all the works in the show, though, were the intimate items stitched in vinyl that spilled out of five small, hand-sewn backpacks displayed on a table, representing members of a family. Along with necessities carried by the owner of each pack, such as a water bottle, a small medicine kit and garlic used to ward off rattlesnakes, were objects specific to each person. Backpack (yellow), clearly the mother's, contained a hand-operated breast pump made from pink vinyl, and rosary beads sewn in white. Her small daughter's Backpack (pink) also contained a rosary, along with dolls and a Cinderella canteen. The father's, Backpack (black), included cigarettes, a wallet and a pair of wire cutters. Each pack tells a poignant story of the bearer's dreams and of the dangerous passage across the border.

If they ever get that far, the travelers Cabrera describes with her sculptures will discover that the United States naturalization test doesn't require prospective citizens to know anything that occurred on this continent before the Mayflower landed in 1620. Our nation forgets the millions of Indians who occupied the continent before anyone else and that the first confirmed landing was by a Spaniard, Ponce de Leon, in 1513, on a shore he christened La Florida. Cabrera challenges our collective lack of understanding with the small details of a family's dreams for a better life, and the dangerous path they travel toward that goal.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning