Amalia Mesa-Bains at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris - installation art, New York, New York

Art in America, Oct, 1993 by Calvin Reid

Amalia Mesa-Bains's installations transform the spaces they occupy into places of mystery and investigation. Through her accumulations of culturally charged objects and images, she examines the way that gender and ethnic identity are defined and explores the complex contemporary dilemmas of the Latino community. In this room installation, "Venus Envy Chapter One (for the First Holy Communion Moments before the End)," Mesa-Bains explored the female mythology of virgin, nun and bride. Working with themes taken from Catholic ritual, Mexican pre-Christian religious imagery and female rites of passage, she delineated the role that each has played in the development of the Latina psyche.

Mesa-Bains turned the exhibition space into both a classroom and sacristy of the personality, veiled in a nostalgic, almost suffocating sense of longing. A ring of floral petals and glinting, speckled sand bordering the room served, in a corny but effective way, to symbolically transform the space into a mythic realm. Circling the gallery at about waist level on three wails was a work called Hail of Mirrors, a sequence of mirrors bearing images of women taken from Christian iconography and family snapshots, accompanied by the artist's bantering written commentary. Below this line of images, as a kind of subtext, ran a list of the names of Mexican pre-Columbian gods. Museum of Memory, in the center of the room, consisted of a grouping of display cases. These held autobiographical material, including two gowns belonging to the artist--her Communion gown and her wedding dress. Other cases were filled with photographs and church trinkets marking the phases of the artist's life and, by extension, commenting on the lives of other women.

Boudoir Chapel faced the entrance to the installation. In front of an enclosure draped in satin, a bank of votive candles occupied one corner and a mirrored vanity table the other. The vanity table was cluttered with images of the artist's family, the Virgin Mary, ancient Mexican gods and a dizzying collection of mementos. It served as a kind of altar to the many cultural and historical currents that have formed and transformed the Latina self, suggesting the forces that have shaped how women see themselves and the way that one woman has come to view her own life.